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THE SPECTATOR: Anne Boleyn's Last Secret

With his wife, Anne Bolyen, in the Tower, Henry VIII considered every detail of her coming death, pouring over plans for the scaffold. As he did so he made a unique decision. Anne, alone amongst all victims of the Tudors, was to be beheaded with a sword and not the traditional axe. The question that has, until now, remained unanswered is - why?

Historians have suggested that Henry VIII chose the sword because Anne had spent many years in France, where the nobility were executed this way, or because it offered a more dignified end. But Henry didn’t care a jot for Anne’s feelings. Anne was told she was to be beheaded on the morning of 18 May, and was then kept waiting until noon before being told she was to die the next day. At the root of Henry’s decision was not Henry thinking about Anne, but about himself.

When Henry VIII fell in love with Anne in 1526, he represented an ideal of chivalric kingship come to life: handsome, pious, and martial. In Europe it was said ‘his great nobleness and fame’ was ‘greater than any Prince since King Arthur’. There could have been no greater compliment for Henry: the legend of Thomas Mallory’s, ‘King Once and King to Be’ was woven into the Tudor family myths.

The first Tudor king, Henry VII, had claimed the Welsh blood-line of the Tudors made them the heirs to King Arthur. He even gave the name to his eldest son. Only when the boy died, shortly after being married to Katherine of Aragon, did Henry VII lose his enthusiasm for the Arthurian myths. For Henry VIII, however, they became increasingly important.

As early as 1516 Henry VIII had the round table hanging in the Great Hall of Winchester Castle, and which it was believed dated back to Camelot, painted with the figure of Arthur bearing Henry’s own features and an Imperial crown. It was Henry’s belief that England was, historically, an empire, and he Arthur’s heir, that later became the basis for his claim to an imperium, or ‘command’ over Church as well as State. It justified the break with the Papacy that allowed him to marry Anne in 1533.

But like Katherine of Aragon, Anne failed to give Henry the son he wanted and when she miscarried in January 1536, he lost hope that she ever would. He began complaining that Anne had seduced him into marrying her – an accusation carrying suggestions of witchcraft – and he showed a growing romantic interest in her maid of honour, Jane Seymour.

Nevertheless, on 30 March 1536, the king’s chief Minister, Thomas Cromwell, assured a foreign ambassador that that ‘notwithstanding that the King was still inclined to pay attention to ladies [such as Jane Seymour]’ he believed the marriage to Anne would continue’.

Dissolving the marriage to Anne was a complex issue for Henry, who feared it would re-confirm ‘the authority of the Pope’. But Anne was also making an enemy of Cromwell, with whom she quarreled over the burning issue of what to do with the money raised from the monasteries Henry was closing down. Anne hoped to see the money go to charitable enterprises, while Cromwell intended to pour it into the King’s pocket.

On 2 April, the chaplain in charge of Anne’s charitable giving delivered a sermon at court that suggested a comparison between Cromwell and the biblical figure Haman, the corrupt minister of an Old Testament King. The sermon noted threateningly that Haman had died on the scaffold.

Anne’s anger with Henry was also evident during these weeks. Her brother, George had let slip that she had complained Henry had ‘neither talent nor vigour’ in bed. Some wondered if she had a lover, a view encouraged by her sometimes outrageous flirting – and it was to be this flirting that triggered her downfall.

On Saturday 28April, when the King’s body servant, Sir Henry Norris, came to her household, Anne asked him why he had not yet married the maid of honour he kept visiting. When Norris shrugged that he preferred to ‘tarry a time’, Anne joked, ‘You look for dead men's shoes, for if ought came to the king but good, you would look to have me’. Imagining the death of the King was a treasonous offence, and Norris, replied, aghast, ‘if he should have any such thought, he would [wish] his head were off’

The next day a young court musician called Mark Smeaton, who had been seen moping after Anne earlier on the Saturday, was taken secretly to Cromwell’s house for questioning. Anne’s conversation with Norris gave Cromwell a means of accusing her of treason. But Norris was unlikely to confess to adultery and so make a charge of plotting the King’s murder plausible. A weaker man was required if Anne’s chastity was to be besmirched – and Smeaton was to fill that role.

Before that evening Henry had learned that Smeaton had confessed to adultery with the Queen. He postponed, but did not cancel, a trip he had planned to take with Anne to Calais in June. He could not be certain what else Cromwell might uncover. The next morning, May Day 1536, he attended a joust with Anne at Greenwich Palace. As the tournament ended a message was passed to the King. Abruptly, he rose from his seat and left for Westminster by horse, taking a handful of attendants. Norris was called to join him, while an astonished Anne was left to oversee the closing of the competition.

As the King’s party rode off Henry asked Norris if he had committed adultery with the Queen, offering to pardon him if he confessed. Norris, a fellow member of the Order of the Garter, Henry’s equivalent of the Knights of the Round Table, found himself cast in the role of Lancelot to Anne’s Guinevere. He angrily – desperately – asserted his innocence. It did him no good. He joined Smeaton in the Tower that night. Anne was taken there the following day along with her brother, accused of adultery with his sister. Two further courtiers would also be convicted at trial of plotting Henry’s death with the Queen.

As Henry’s sexual inadequacies were paraded during the trials, he responded by advertising his virility, staying out all hours, banqueting with beautiful girls, seemingly full of ‘extravagant joy’. In private, however, he comforted himself in a different way, obsessing over the details of Anne’s coming death. In Thomas Mallory’s Death of Arthur, the King sentenced Guinevere to death by burning, (although it was never carried out). Henry decided Anne would be beheaded with a sword – the symbol of Camelot, of a rightful King, and of masculinity. Historians argue over whether Anne was really guilty of adultery, and if Henry or Cromwell was the more responsible for her destruction. But the choice of a sword to kill Anne reflects one certain fact: Henry’s overweening vanity and self-righteousness.

‘I heard say the executioner was very good and I have but a little neck’, Anne said the day before her execution, and laughing, she put her hands round her throat. It was, at least, to be a quick death: her head fell with one blow, her eyes and lips still moving as it landed on the straw.

THIS ARTICLE WAS DRAWN FROM A MORE DETAILED ACCOUNT IN LEANDA DE LISLE'S BOOK TUDOR: THE FAMILY STORY (1437-1603) PUBLISHED IN THE U.S. UNDER THE TITLE TUDOR: PASSION, MANIPULATION, MURDER, THE STORY OF ENGLAN;DS MOST NOTORIOUS ROYAL FAMILY (2013)

BBC HISTORY MAGAZINE: Richard III, Henry VII, Elizabeth Woodville and the truth behind the disappearance of the Princes in the Tower

VANISHING ACT: Why did the Princes in the Tower disappear? Richard III was accused of their murder in 1483. Yet two years later his rival Henry VII did his best to ensure the princes remained forgotten. Clues in the research for her book ‘Tudor’ helped Leanda de Lisle make a breakthrough in solving the riddle at the heart of the mystery.

Locked in the Tower in June 1483 with his younger brother, the twelve-year-old Edward V was certain ‘that death was facing him’. Two overthrown kings had died in suspicious circumstances already that century. Yet it was still possible that their uncle, Richard III, would spare them.

The princes were so very young, and if it were accepted they were bastards, as their uncle claimed, they would pose little threat to him. The innocent little Richard Duke of York – no more than eleven years old - remained ‘joyous’, and full of ‘frolics’, even as the last of their servants were dismissed. But the boys were spotted behind the Tower windows less and less often, and by the summer’s end, they had vanished.

It is the fact of their disappearance that lies at the heart of the many conspiracy theories about what happened to the princes. Murder was suspected, but without bodies no one could be certain even that they were dead. A hundred and one different scenarios have been painted since. In the nearest surviving contemporary accounts Richard is accused of ordering their deaths, with the boys either suffocated with their bedding, or drowned, or their arteries cut. There were also theories that one or both of the princes escaped.

In more modern times some came to believe that Richard III was innocent of ordering the children’s deaths and spirited his nephews abroad or to a safe place nearer home, only for them to be killed later by Henry VII, who feared their rival claims to the throne. None of these theories, however, have provided a satisfactory answer to the riddle at the heart of this mystery: the fact they had simply vanished.

If the princes were alive, why did Richard did not say so in October 1483, when the rumours he had had them killed was fuelling a rebellion? If they were dead, why had he not followed earlier examples of royal killings? The bodies of deposed kings were displayed and claims made that they had died of natural causes, so that loyalties could be transferred to the new king.

That the answer to these questions lies in the fifteenth century seems obvious, but it can be hard to stop thinking like twenty-first century detectives and start thinking like contemporaries. To the modern mind, if Richard III was a religious man and a good king, as many believe, then he could not have ordered the deaths of two children. But even good people do bad things when given the right motivation.

In the fifteenth century it was a primary duty of good kingship to ensure peace and national harmony. After his coronation Richard III had continued to employ many of his brother Edward IV’s former servants, but by the end of July 1483 it was already clear that some did not accept that Edward IV’s sons were illegitimate, and judged Richard to be a usurper. The fact the princes remained a focus of opposition gives Richard a strong motive for having them killed – just as his brother had killed the king he had deposed.

The childlike, helpless, Lancastrian Henry VI, was found dead in the Tower in 1471, after over a decade of conflict between the rival royal Houses of Lancaster and York. It was said he was killed by grief and rage over the recent death in battle of his son, but few can have doubted that Edward IV had ordered his murder. Henry VI’s death extirpated the House of Lancaster. Only Henry VI’s half nephew, Henry Tudor, a descendent of John of Gaunt, founder of the Lancastrian House, through his mother’s illegitimate Beaufort line, was left to represent their cause.

Trapped in European exile, Henry Tudor had posed a negligible threat to Edward IV. But Richard was acutely aware there had been an unexpected sequel to Henry VI’s death. The murdered king had been popular acclaimed a saint with rich and poor alike venerating him as an innocent whose troubled life gave him some insight into their own difficulties. Miracles were reported at the site of his modest grave, in Chertsey Abbey, Surrey. A simple peasant claimed that the dead king had even deigned to help him when he had a bean trapped in his ear, with it popping out after he had prayed to the deposed king.

Edward IV had failed to put a halt to the popular cult, and Richard III shared his late brothers anxieties about its ever-growing power. Ithad a strong following in his home city of York, where a statue of ‘Henry the saint’ had been built on the choir screen at York Minster. In 1484 Richard would attempt to take control of the cult with an act of reconciliation, moving Henry VI’s body to St George’s chapel, Windsor. In the meantime there was a high risk that the dead princes too would attract a cult, for in them the religious qualities attached to royalty were combined with the purity of childhood.

In England we have no equivalent today to the shrine at Lourdes in France, visited by thousands of pilgrims every year, looking for healing or spiritual renewal. But we can remember the vast crowds outside Buckingham Palace after the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. Imagine that feeling and enthusiasm in pilgrims visiting the tombs of two young princes and greatly magnified by the closeness people then felt with the dead. It would have been extremely dangerous to the King who had taken their throne. The vanishing of the princes was for Richard a case of least said, soonest mended, for without a grave there could be no focus for a cult, and without a body or items belonging to the dead placed on display, there would be no relics either.

Nevertheless Richard III needed the princes’ mother, Elizabeth Woodville, and other supporters, to know they were dead in order to forestall plots raised in their name, and under the country under his rule. According to the Tudor historian Polydore Vergil Elizabeth Woodville fainted when she was told her sons had been killed. As she came round, ‘she wept, she cryed out loud, and with lamentable shrieks made all the house ring, she struck her breast, tore and cut her hair’. She also called for vengeance.

Elizabeth Woodville made an agreement with Henry Tudor’s mother, Margaret Beaufort, that he should marry her daughter, Elizabeth of York, and called on Edwardian loyalists to back their cause. The rebellion that followed in October 1483 proved that Richard had failed to restore peace and harmony, and although he defeated these risings, less than two years later, at the battle of Bosworth in August 1485, he was betrayed by part of his own army, and was killed, sword in hand.

The princes were revenged, but it soon became evident that Henry VII was in no hurry to investigate the princes’ fate. It is possible Henry feared such an investigation would draw attention to a role in their fate played by someone close to his cause – most likely Henry Stafford, Duke of Buckingham. The duke, who came from a Lancastrian family, had been a close ally of Richard’s in the overthrow of Edward V, but later turned against Richard. Known as a ‘sore and hard dealing man’, it is possible he had encouraged Richard to have the princes murdered, planning then to see Richard killed and the House of York overthrown. Richard executed Buckingham for treason in November 1483, but Buckingham’s name remained associated at home and aboard with the princes’ disappearance.

What is certain, however, is that Henry, like Richard, had good reasons for wishing to forestall a cult of the princes. Henry’s blood claim to the throne was extremely weak and he was fearful of being seen as a mere king consort to Elizabeth of York. To counter this Henry claimed the throne in his own right, citing divine providence – God’s intervention on earth – as evidence that he was a true king (for only God made kings). A key piece of evidence used in support of this was a story that, a few months before his murder, ‘the saint’, Henry VI, had prophesised Henry Tudor’s reign.

It would not have been wise to allow Yorkist royal saints to compete with the memory of Henry VI, whose cult Henry VII now wished to encourage. Nothing was said therefore in 1485 of the princes’ disappearance, beyond the vague accusation in parliament that autumn that Richard III was guilty of ‘treasons, homicides and murders in shedding of infants blood’. No search was made for their bodies, and like Hamlet’s father, they were given no hatchment over their bones, no noble rite of burial. Indeed even the fate of their souls was, seemingly, abandoned.

I have not found any evidence of endowments set up to pay for prayers for the princes that century. Henry may well have feared the churches where these so called ‘chantries’ might be established would become centres for the kind of cult that he wanted to avoid. But their absence would have struck people as very strange. Praying for the dead was a crucial part of medieval religion. In December 1485, when Henry issued a special charter re-founding his favourite religious order, the Observant Friars, at Greenwich, he noted that offering Masses for the dead was, ‘the greatest work of piety and mercy, for through it souls would be purged’. It was unthinkable not to help the souls of your loved ones pass from purgatory to heaven with prayers and Masses. On the other hand, it was akin to a curse to say a requiem for a living person – you were effectively praying for their death.

The obvious question posed by the lack of public prayers for the princes was, were they still alive? And, as Vergil recalled, in 1491 there appeared in Ireland, as if, ‘raised from the dead one of the sons of King Edward..a youth by the name of Richard’. Henry VII said that the man claiming to be the younger of the Princes in the Tower was, in fact, a Dutchman called Perkin Warbeck, but who could be sure?

Henry was more anxious than ever that the princes be forgotten and when their mother, Elizabeth Woodville, died in June 1492, she was buried ‘privily..without any solemn dirge done for her obit’. It has been suggested that this may reflect her dying wishes to be buried, ‘without pomp’. But Henry VII would also ask to be buried without pomp. He still expected, and got, amongst the most stately funerals of the Middle Ages. Elizabeth Woodville emphatically had not. Much has been made of this in conspiracy theories concerning the princes (especially on the question of whether she believed them to be alive), but Henry’s motives become clear when recalled in their period context.

This was an era of visual symbols and display: kings projected their power and significance in palaces decorated with their badges, in rich clothes and elaborate ceremonies. Elizabeth Woodville, like her sons, was being denied the images of a great funeral with its effigies, banners, and grand ceremonial. This caused negative comment at the time. But with Warbeck’s appearance Henry wanted to avoid any nostalgia for the past glories of the House of York

It was 1497 before Perkin Warbeck was captured. Henry then kept him alive to publicly and repeatedly confess his modest birth until he was executed eventually in 1499. Yet even then Henry continued to fear the power of the vanished Princes. Three years later it was given out that a condemned traitor called Sir James Tyrell had, before his execution, confessed to arranging their murder on Richard’s orders. Henry VIII’s future chancellor, Thomas More, claimed he had been told the murdered boys had been buried at the foot of some stairs in the Tower, but that Richard had asked for their bodies to be re-buried with dignity, and that those involved had subsequently died so their final resting place was unknown - a most convenient outcome for Henry.

While the princes graves remained unmarked the tomb of Henry VI had come to rival the internationally famous tomb of Thomas Becket at Canterbury as a site of mass pilgrimage. Henry ran a campaign to have his half uncle beatified by the Pope, which continued even after his death, ending only with Henry VIII’s break with Rome. The Reformation then brought to a close the cult of saints in England. Our cultural memories of their power faded away, so we overlooked the significance of the cult of Henry VI in the fate of the princes.

In 1674, long after the passing of the Tudors, two skeletons were recovered in the Tower, in a place that resembled More’s description of their first burial place. They were interred at Westminster Abbey, not far from where Henry VII lies. In 1933 they were removed and examined by two doctors. Broken and incomplete, the skeletons were judged to be two children aged between seven and eleven and between eleven and thirteen. The bones, were returned to their urn in the Abbey, and whose ever they are, these little bones remain a testament to the failure of Richard and Henry to bury the princes in eternal obscurity.

A version of this article appeared in BBC History Magazine October 2013 to mark the piblication of Leanda de Lisle's Tudor: The Family Story (UK) and Tudor: Passion, Manipulation, Murder, the Story of England's Most Notorious Royal Family (US)

HISTORY TODAY: Margaret Douglas at the Tudor Courts

In April 1530 Henry VIII’s ordered dress from the Great Wardrobe for ‘our niece’, Lady Margaret Douglas, to welcome her arrival at court. The fourteen-year old princess was destined to be a player in key events over four Tudor reigns. Her youthful romances would see her caught up in the fall of two of Henry’s queens, she would be arrested at least four times, imprisoned in the Tower twice, and plot - ultimately successfully -for her heirs to inherit queen Elizabeth’s throne. In Margaret’s will of 1578, she still remembered her uncle fondly, listing a picture of Henry amongst her treasured possessions. Yet her dramatic life story and dynastic significance has been obscured by the story of a quarrel between them that never was.

Margaret Douglas was the child of Henry’s elder sister, Margaret Tudor, Queen of Scots, by her second husband Archibald Douglas, Earl of Angus. As such she was third in line to the English throne in 1530, following her elder half-brother, the sixteen-year-old James V of Scots, and Henry’s daughter, Mary Tudor, who was four months younger than she. Her parents’ unhappy marriage had been annulled in 1527 and a year later, when her father was anxious to flee the stepson who hated him, and needed free passage to England, he had kidnapped Margaret and sent her to Henry as a good will gesture.

Henry had ignored her mother’s pleas for her to be returned home. Margaret was too valuable a commodity on the international marriage market to let go. Nevertheless, for eighteen months Margaret had been left in the north of England while Henry had focussed on his pursuit of a papal annulment of his own marriage to Katherine of Aragon. His hopes of being freed to marry his mistress Anne Boleyn, had all but drained away when he, at last, sent for Margaret. She found Henry living alongside a ‘somewhat stout’ Katherine, as well as the hit-tempered Anne, in what David Starkey has characterised as a virtual ménage a trios.

Henry left Katherine of Aragon for good in the summer of 1531, while Margaret was sent on to join her cousin Mary’s household as her principle lady-in-waiting. She was to stay at Mary’s side during one of the most traumatic periods of the princess’s life: the break with Rome, Henry marriage to Anne Boleyn, the birth of Anne’s daughter, Elizabeth, and Henry’s decision to have Mary declared a bastard. With Mary’s household broken up in 1534, Margaret was then transferred to Anne Boleyn’s Privy Chamber.

The now eighteen-year-old Margaret was described by foreign ambassadors as beautiful and highly esteemed. Despite her closeness to Mary she made friends with a group of talented young courtiers related to Anne, and who together contributed to the famous collection of poetry known as the Devonshire manuscript. Amongst these friends was the twenty-three year old Lord Thomas Howard, a younger brother of the Anne’s uncle, the Duke of Norfolk. He and Margaret fell in love and at first Henry seemed to encourage the couple, but when they betrothed at Easter 1536 they did so in secret.

The atmosphere at Court was tense. Henry had married Anne in the expectation of her delivering male heirs, but the birth of Elizabeth had been followed by miscarriages – the latest that January. He had begun flirting with another of Anne’s ladies in waiting, Jane Seymour, and Anne was quarrelling with the King’s chief minister and vicar-general, Thomas Cromwell. On May Day 1536 Anne was suddenly arrested, accused of adultery with several men, including her own brother, and of plotting the King’s death. By the end of the month she was dead, beheaded for treason.

Henry promptly married Jane Seymour with Margaret obliged to attend on the bride at the wedding. But these shocking events had a still more personal impact. Anne’s daughter Elizabeth was bastardized, leaving Margaret and her brother James V as Henry’s senior heirs in blood. As Henry had no legitimate heirs they were also a potential alternative focus source of loyalty. To counter this a new Act of Succession was drawn up that gave Henry the right to appoint his heirs: even, if he wished, his illegitimate children over his legitimate nephew and niece. Henry’s bastard son Henry Fitzroy, Duke of Richmond, stood to be the principle beneficiary, since of the king’s children he, at least, was male.

It was as it emerged that Fitzroy was terminally ill with, ‘a rapid consumption’ that Henry learned of Margaret Douglas’s betrothal to Thomas Howard. His bastardized daughters, Mary and Elizabeth, made far weaker claimants than Margaret, legitimate and married into the powerful Howard family. Henry had the couple sent to the Tower.

On 18 July a Bill of Attainder proclaimed that Thomas Howard, having been ‘ led and seduced by the devil’ had ‘ traitorously contracted himself by crafty, fair and flattering words to .. the Lady Margaret Douglas'. His object being to usurp the throne, trusting people would prefer the English-born Margaret, to the foreign King of Scots, 'to whom this Realm has, nor ever had, any affection'.

On 23July it was reported that Thomas Howard had been condemned to death for treason and that the twenty-one year old Margaret Douglas was spared only because the marriage had not been consummated. There was, in fact, a further reason. The annulment of the marriage of Margaret’s parents’ had left her legitimacy intact. The Attainder nevertheless referred on several occasions to Margaret Douglas as being her mother’s ‘natural (ie bastard) daughter’. This was a clear attempt to demote her in the succession and ensure Henry’s children had the superior claim.

Margaret believed that Cromwell had also helped to save her life, and she took his advice in pretending she had no further interest in Howard. The King’s anxieties were further reduced after Jane Seymour bore a son, Edward, on 12 October 1537. Margaret (by then imprisoned at Syon Abbey) was released early in November, only to learn that Thomas Howard had died in the Tower of ‘an ague’. Margaret took the news ‘very heavily’. It would be four years before Margaret risked her heart again.

Henry was married to his fifth wife, Katherine Howard, when Margaret formed an attachment to the new queen’s brother, Charles. Unfortunately for Margaret – and still more so for the doomed Katherine Howard – it emerged in November 1541 that the queen had been unchaste before her marriage and was conducting a new relationship with a gentleman of the Privy Chamber, Thomas Culpepper. As the investigations uncovered Margaret’s latest romance she was delivered a chilling warning. She had ‘demeaned herself towards His Majesty, first with the Lord Thomas Howard, and second with Charles Howard’, to whom she had shown ‘overmuch lightness’. She was advised: ‘beware the third time’.

Following Katherine Howard’s beheading Margaret was careful not to risk any further unauthorized love affairs, and when she did marry it was at Henry’s arrangement. In 1543 he was hoping to build up a body of support in Scotland for a marriage between James V’s infant daughter, Mary Queen of Scots, and his son Edward. Margaret was to be a pawn in these plans, with Henry offering her as a bride to Matthew Stewart, Earl of Lennox, who was to lead a pro-English Scots party from England. Happily, Margaret was delighted with Lennox, ‘a strong man of personage well shaped’ who ‘was most pleasant for a lady’. Lennox was equally enamoured of Margaret and their marriage of 1544 proved happy.

Margaret was not mentioned in the Third Act of Succession, which had been given the royal assent in that spring. Having named Mary and Elizabeth as Edward’s heirs, the Act merely promised that Elizabeth’s heirs would be named later in letters patent. The king remained anxious to protect his children from rival claimants, but on a personal level Henry was fond of Margaret, writing to her from Calais that September, sending the new bride his special ‘recommendations’.

Margaret’s biographers tell us that, nevertheless, in 1546 she quarrelled with Henry so bitterly over religion, that, when the dying king named the long stop heirs to Elizabeth that winter, she was denied her rightful place in line of succession, along with James V’s daughter, Mary, Queen of Scots. This supposed quarrel has helped diminish Margaret’s significance in Tudor and Stuart history, with the impression given that she was a woman of poor judgement and one who lacked political importance thereafter. This is far from the truth.

The Lennox payments that year to chantry priests, who prayed for souls in purgatory, does indicate religious conservatism, but Henry’s will also asked for masses to be said for his soul. The only evidence for Margaret’s quarrel lies in a source that postdates Henry’s death by fifteen years, but it remains important because, four hundred and fifty years later, the mud thrown at Margaret then still sticks.

By this time, early in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, Margaret was forty-six, and the birth eight children had taken its toll on her good looks. But she had done well in negotiating the lethal riptides of the changing courts of Edward VI and Mary I, as well as being deeply involved in Scottish affairs, promoting her claims as her father’s heir. Indeed Margaret had matured into a political operator to match her great-grandmother, Margaret Beaufort, who had helped plot her son Henry VII’s rise to the throne.

The twenty-nine year old Elizabeth had invited Margaret to court to celebrate the Christmas season of 1561/2, and in order to keep an eye on her cousin. Elizabeth had discovered Margaret was plotting to marry her eldest son, Henry, Lord Darnley, to Mary, Queen of Scots. Under the terms of Henry’s VIII will Elizabeth’s heir was her Protestant cousin, Lady Katherine Grey, granddaughter of Henry’s younger sister, Mary, the French Queen. But some considered this unsigned document invalid, even forged, making Mary, Queen of Scots Elizabeth’s heir, as the senior in blood. If she were to be married to Darnley his English birth, combined with his Tudor blood, would greatly strengthen her claim.

A nervous Margaret insisted to the Spanish ambassador. Alavarez de Quadra, that securing the succession for Mary, Queen of Scots was her duty, for it would protect England from a civil war on Elizabeth’s death. But as the ambassador noted, Elizabeth based ‘her security on there being no certain successor should the people tire of her rule’. Margaret was in danger of being returned to the Tower, and her fears of this grew when she spotted an agent of a sacked Lennox servant called Thomas Bishop, skulking at court.

Margaret and Lennox suspected Bishop was feeding information against them to Elizabeth’s Secretary of State, William Cecil. In response they launched a pre-emptive attack on Bishop’s reputation. They described how Bishop had come to work for Lennox while their marriage was being arranged in 1543. Henry VIII had rewarded Bishop for his good service to Lennox, but, they claimed, Henry later regretted this, ‘understanding that [Bishop] went about to set dissension between the said Earl and his lady’, and Bishop had proved a coward, a sexual reprobate, and a thief to boot.

It is Bishop’s reply to the Lennox attack that is quoted by historians as evidence of Margaret’s fatal quarrel with Henry. In a long memorandum Bishop focuses his attention on Margaret, describing his work for Elizabeth’s predecessors in the face of Margaret’s enmity, and his rewards. In particular he refers to land grants Henry gave him in October 1546, ‘a little afore his death and after the breach with my lady Lennox'. Bishop does not say what her argument with Henry was about, but in another manuscript, Cotton Caligula B VIII (folios 165-168), Bishop clarifies matters.

Bishop claims that Margaret had wanted him sacked in the 1540s, ‘seeking the rule of her husband’ and that Henry VIII was so angry about her false accusations against Bishop that, ‘she ever after lost a part of [the King’s] heart, as appeared at his death’. In other words, Henry VIII demoted Margaret in line of succession because she was rude about Thomas Bishop!

Now, Henry VIII evidently did value Bishop’s services, but the king had named the Grey sisters as Elizabeth’s heirs because as unmarried females and minors, with only a distant claim under Common law, they had posed far less of a threat to his children than either Mary, Queen of Scots, or Margaret, who alone amongst his sisters’ children, had a growing son.

It was nowhere else suggested that Margaret had ever quarreled with Henry over religion, and Bishop’s claim that there had been any quarrel at all does not appear to have been taken seriously. But he had other, more acute, accusations to make and by 2 April Margaret was imprisoned at the former Carthusian Abbey of Sheen, while Lennox was in the Tower.

In May Margaret’s interrogators complained she was being extremely obstinate in her replies to charges that included treason in the recent war in Scotland, and secret communications with a foreign monarch, (Mary, Queen of Scots) as well as the French and Spanish ambassadors. There were also said to be ‘proofs’ that Margaret did ‘not love the Queen’.

Bishop claimed Margaret had persuaded Mary I to imprison Elizabeth in the Tower in 1554 – which was believable as Mary I had wanted to leave Margaret the throne, against what proved possible. Other servants confessed that Margaret often referred to Elizabeth as a bastard. They further described how her fool would roundly mock Elizabeth and her favourite Robert Dudley. Dudley’s wife, Amy Robsart, had been found at the bottom of a flight of stairs in 1560 with a broken neck, and the servants said Margaret called him as a pox-ridden wife-murderer.

There was even an attempt to accuse Margaret of planning to kill the Queen with witchcraft, a smear Cecil had used successfully against several Catholics the previous year. Margaret often heard Mass said ‘by one little Sir William’ and it was being alleged that she was in contact with ‘witches and soothsayers’, even that she had conjured the lightening that had burned down of the steeple of St Paul’s in 1561 on the feast of Corpus Christi.

It was to be Cecil’s life’s work to prevent any Catholic inheriting Elizabeth’s throne, and it is this Elizabethan antagonism to Margaret’s post Marian Catholicism that has been read into her relationship with Henry VIII. It is the kind of anachronism we see time and again in Tudor history, with later anti Catholic attitudes projected into the past.

Meanwhile, with fear of witchcraft being stoked in parliament, where MPs were making it an offence in common law, Cecil had been busy seeking information in Scotland to ‘prove’ Margaret illegitimate. This concerned Margaret still more than the wild claims of treason and occult practises, which Lennox characterized as the lies of, ‘exploiters, hired men and other fantastical persons’. When Margaret learned that Bishop had described her as ‘a mere bastard’, she fired off a furious missive, reminding Cecil, ‘Even as God hath made me, I am lawful daughter to the Queen of Scots [Margaret Tudor] and the Earl of Angus which none alive is able to make me other’.

In the end Elizabeth chose to leave Margaret’s life unharmed and her legitimacy intact. Margaret’s royal claims remained a useful counter balance to those of the Protestant Katherine Grey. The following year, with Elizabeth believing Margaret’s ambitions had been tamed by her imprisonment, Margaret and Lennox were freed. Margaret even became godmother to Cecil’s baby daughter in 1564, and named the child Elizabeth. But behind the scenes she continued to seek support for her son’s marriage.

Eventually Margaret’s allies helped convince Elizabeth to grant Darnley a passport to Scotland, and in April 1565 a horrified Elizabeth realised his marriage to the Queen of Scots might actually go ahead. It was in a failed effort to prevent it that Margaret was, at last, returned to the Tower. For nearly two years following Darnley’s proclamation as King of Scots, Margaret remained imprisoned – with disastrous consequences for mother and son.

The new Spanish ambassador, Diego Guzman de Silva, believed that if Margaret had been in Scotland her good counsel would have prevented the breakdown of Darnley’s marriage, and his involvement in the killing of his wife’s principle servant, David Riccio in 1566. As it was, Darnley’s misjudgements paved the way to his murder in Edinburgh in 1567.

When Margaret was given the terrible news of Darnley’s death, she collapsed in ‘such passion of mind’ it was feared she might die of grief. To ease her suffering Elizabeth had her moved out of the Tower and by the time Mary, Queen of Scots was overthrown in Scotland and fled to England in 1568, Margaret was free once more. It was the safety of her infant grandson, James VI, that now most concerned Margaret.

Although James is known as a ‘Stuart’, using the French spelling of ‘Stewart’ favoured by his mother, the dynasty takes its name from the paternal line represented by Margaret’s son Darnley – and it was a line she was determined to protect. In 1570 Margaret persuaded Elizabeth to accept Lennox as James’s regent in Scotland while she remained in England as his ambassador at Court. The couple kept in close touch, with Lennox relying on his ‘Good Meg’ for her advice until he was shot in 1571, during a raid on Stirling made by supporters of the imprisoned Mary, Queen of Scots. His last act was to send his love to Margaret.

Of her eight children Margaret was now left with one surviving son, Charles. Despite Elizabeth’s virulent opposition to his marrying anyone, Margaret arranged a match to a daughter of the courtier Bess of Hardwick in 1574. Since this non-royal, non-noble, marriage did not pose a threat to the queen, Margaret was punished only with a spell of house arrest. Charles died of an unknown illness in 1576, but he left a daughter, little Arbella, to comfort Margaret in her last years.

A picture Margaret had painted of Arbella, aged twenty-three months, depicts a hazel-eyed infant clutching a doll, and around her neck, on a triple chain of gold, hangs a shield with the countess’s coronet along the Lennox motto in French, ‘To achieve, I endure’ – and Margaret did endure. Her old enemy Thomas Bishop had, by 1576, proved a rather less reliable Tudor servant that he had claimed to be. In 1569 he had been found to be in contact with adherents of Mary, Queen of Scots, and had ended up in the Tower from where he was released only that year.

Eventually Bishop would return to his Scottish homeland, where Margaret remained in contact with her grandson, sending James works of history, and on one occasion a pair of embroidered hawking gloves. In 1578, aged sixty-two, Margaret also continued to entertain Elizabeth’s most powerful courtiers. At a dinner that February she had Robert Dudley, now Earl of Leicester, as her guest. Margaret was adept at turning enemies into allies and they had once even worked together towards the Darnley marriage, despite her earlier accusation that he was a pox-ridden wife murderer.

By the end of that month Margaret was seriously ill and on 26 February she wrote her will. Twelve hundred pounds was put aside for Margaret’s funeral and burial expenses at Westminster Abbey, while amongst her many bequests was her ‘tablet picture of Henry VIII’, which she left to Dudley.

‘Tablets’ often referred to pendant jewels containing pictures or even miniature prayer books. Margaret’s could be the famous gold enameled Tudor girdle prayer book known as Stowe manuscript 956. It came to the British Library from a collection that belonged to the heirs of William Seymour, Duke of Somerset, the widower of Margaret’s granddaughter Arbella. She had, as a child, been betrothed to Robert Dudley’s short-lived legitimate son, and it may have passed to her then, if it had not always stayed in her care. It contains an illuminated miniature bust of Henry VIII, dating from around 1540

Margaret Douglas died on 10March and on 3 April she had a funeral appropriate to a royal princess. She was buried in what is now called the Henry VII chapel close to her ancestress and namesake Margaret Beaufort, whose role in ushering in the Tudor dynasty she had emulated in her own life and dynastic ambitions. Few tombs in the Abbey match the royal ancestors listed on Margaret’s, but she was prouder still to be ‘ a progenitor of princes’ in her son Darnley and her grandson King James.

When Darnley was a baby Margaret had heard a prophecy that he would one day unite the crowns of England and Scotland. Although he was dead his English birth, as well as his Tudor blood, greatly enhanced James’s claim to Elizabeth’s throne. One day, Margaret believed, James would lie in Westminster Abbey, as a King of England - as indeed he does today.

THIS ARTICLE WAS DRAWN FROM A MORE DETAILED ACCOUNT IN LEANDA DE LISLE'S BOOK TUDOR: THE FAMILY STORY (1437-1603) PUBLISHED IN THE U.S. UNDER THE TITLE TUDOR: PASSION, MANIPULATION, MURDER, THE STORY OF ENGLAN;DS MOST NOTORIOUS ROYAL FAMILY (2013)

INTELLIGENT LIFE: Debunking the Myth of Lady Jane Grey

Known as the “nine-day queen”, Lady Jane Grey has become an iconic Tudor victim: virginal, sweet and beheaded at 16, largely because of the machinations of her evil mother. But is any of this true? Leanda de Lisle discovers otherwise ...

Special to MORE INTELLIGENT LIFE

Lady Jane Grey is mythologised, even festishised, as an innocent girl sacrificed on the altar of her mother's ambition. But behind the popular biographies of the Tudor Queen lies a different story of misogyny and masochism. It seems the much-maligned mother is in fact the victim.

When I began researching for "The Sisters Who Would be Queen", my triple biography of Lady Jane and her sisters, Katherine and Mary Grey, I hoped the well-known life of the iconic teenage Queen, would lend some insight to the younger sisters, the forgotten heirs to Elizabeth Tudor. I assumed there would be little new to day about Jane herself. But as I began my research it became clear that nothing written about Jane could be trusted. The first woman to wield the power of a Tudor monarch had been reduced, over time, to an eroticised image of female helplessness. Meanwhile, her conventional mother became the embodiment of the belief that powerful women are monstrous and mannish.

The traditional story runs like this: Lady Jane Grey was born in 1537, the daughter of Henry VIII's royal niece, Frances, and her husband, Harry Grey, Marques of Dorset. The stout, bejewelled woman in a double portrait by Hans Eworth is still used to illustrate Frances's nature. "Physically she bore a marked resemblance to Henry VIII," notes Alison Weir, a best-selling historian, in her book "The Children of Henry VIII". Here was a woman, "determined to have her own way, and greedy for power and riches," who "ruled her husband and daughters tyrannically and, in the case of the latter, often cruelly."

So Jane grew up an abused child, beaten regularly by her unloving mother. In 1553 the 15-year-old Jane was forced (beaten again) to marry the 18-year-old Guildford Dudley, son of the principal figure in the King's Privy Council, John Dudley. Frances believed the marriage would promote Jane as heir to the dying Protestant King Edward VI. Weeks later Edward did indeed bequeath Jane his throne, in place of his Catholic sister Mary Tudor. Jane was obliged to accept, though she protested through tears that Mary was the rightful claimant.

On July 10th 1553 Jane was processed to the Tower as Queen. The red-haired, red-lipped, smiling girl was so tiny, the story goes, that she wore platform shoes to give her height. Nine days later Mary Tudor overthrew Jane, imprisoning her in the Tower from where she had reigned. Tried and convicted of treason, she remained a prisoner, hoping for pardon, until her father led a failed rebellion against Mary. Although she had nothing to do with the rebellion, Jane was beheaded on February 12th 1554, an "innocent usurper". She was only 16.

The myth is encapsulated in Paul Delaroche's 1833 portrait of Jane, bound and dressed in white on the scaffold (pictured above), a painting with all the erotic overtones of a virgin sacrifice. (Nancy Mitford startlingly told Evelyn Waugh that this image was the source of her adolescent sexual fantasies.) Seemingly unmoved by the execution of both daughter and husband, Frances was remarried within a month to a boyish 21-year-old servant named Adrian Stokes. She lived only for pleasure.

But what factual basis is there for believing Frances was a monster? The accusations of child abuse are built on a story related over a decade after Jane was beheaded. In "The Schoolmaster", a book published in 1570 by Roger Ascham, an Elizabethan scholar, a young Jane Grey is described as reading Plato's Phaedo in Greek while the rest of the household was out hunting. Interrupted briefly from her quiet study, Jane explains that she loves learning because her lessons with her kindly tutor are a respite from the abuse of her parents, who pinch and nip at her if she doesn't perform every task perfectly. "One of the greatest benefits that God ever gave me, is that He sent me so sharp, severe parents and so gentle a schoolmaster," Ascham recalls her saying. Yet in a letter to Jane written only months after this meeting, Ascham commented merely on her parents' pride in her work. Her tutor, John Aylmer, meanwhile, was writing letters to a Swiss theologian complaining that Jane "was at that age [when]...all people are inclined to follow their own ways," and asked how best to "provide bridles for restive horses" such as this spirited girl.

By the time Edward VI was dying, Jane was an exceptionally well-educated Protestant who in fact shared her parents' intense religious convictions. Her tutor Aylmer recorded that before the crises of 1553, Jane had snubbed gifts from the Catholic Mary Tudor, whom she condemned as "against God’s Word". There is no evidence dating from before Jane's overthrow that she had opposed her marriage to Guildford Dudley in 1553, or supported Mary Tudor’s right to be Queen. And the description of the tiny, smiling girl being processed to the Tower as Queen is a fraud. It was written a few years after Delaroche's portrait of Jane was bequeathed to the British nation in 1902, and its red-lipped girl may even have been inspired by it.

As Queen regnant Jane wielded, in theory, a monarch’s power over church and state. But Edward had chosen Jane as his heir not only because she was a Protestant, but also, he noted, because he trusted her husband’s family. Jane’s father in law, John Dudley, was the Lord President of his Council. Since female rule was considered unnatural, it was assumed that Jane’s husband or father-in-law would take effective command. Unfortunately for Jane, Edward’s love for the Dudleys was not shared by the country. Indeed, John Dudley was widely hated, considered the root of the government's unpopular policies.

To quell public venom, Jane tried to advertise her independence from the Dudleys by signing documents in her own hand, and by insisting she would make her husband a duke, not a King. Despite these efforts, the Dudley name damaged her cause and contributed to her overthrow. A contemporary account by Robert Wingfield recorded Frances pleading with the victorious Mary Tudor that they were victims of Dudley ambitions, and insisting that she had opposed Jane’s marriage. Her closeness to her daughter is suggested by Jane's own comments, which mirror her mother’s. In one outburst Jane damned her father-in-law for having "brought me and our stock in most miserable calamity and misery by his exceeding ambition."

Early hopes that Mary might pardon her predecessor dimmed after Jane vehemently opposed Mary’s legalisation of the Catholic Mass. In an open letter to a Catholic convert, Jane condemned the Mass as "wicked" and exhorted Protestants to "Return, return again unto Christ’s war." When her father led an armed rebellion shortly afterwards, Jane was judged a continuing threat. She was executed, aged about 16, on February 12th 1554, a determined martyr, not merely a victim.

Frances did remarry, but over a year later. Her new husband, Adrian Stokes, was no boy-toy, but an educated Protestant of her own age, who held a senior position in her household as her Master of the Horse. By not choosing a nobleman, she protected her surviving daughters from further conjecture concerning the throne. The double portrait by Eworth mentioned above was mislabelled in 1727 as Frances and a brawny young Stokes; in the 1980s it was proven to be a portrait of a Lady Dacre and her son. Queen Elizabeth I, who loved her own Master of the Horse, Robert Dudley, would later admit that she wished she could marry as Frances had.

So how did the myths begin? The answer is with Jane. Aware of the damage being done to the Protestant cause by its association with treason, she announced on the scaffold that while she was guilty in law of treason, having been proclaimed queen, she had never sought the throne but merely accepted it. From this kernel of truth wider claims about Jane's innocence took root. In the 17th and 18th century her story was influenced by the feminine passivity deemed appropriate in a young girl. A sexual dimension is evident in Edward Young's 1714 poem, "The Force of Religion", which invites men to gaze on a pure Jane in her "private closet". In the following decade the portrait of Lady Dacre was mislabelled as Frances.

The effigy of the slim and elegant woman on Frances's tomb in Westminster Abbey has since been ignored in favour of spurious comparisons to Henry VIII. She was far more useful as a sexist archetype, the powerful, sexual, ambitious and mannish mother, to be pitted against Jane, her helpless, chaste and feminine daughter. Although Mary Tudor inspired John Knox's diatribe against "the monstrous regiment of women", she was a less useful counterpoint to Jane as she was seen as being led by male figures–her foreign husband, priests and so forth. The re-invented Frances, by contrast, "ruled her husband".

For centuries it was believed that women in power lost their femininity and became barren–a theory that dates from Greek myth. The masculine qualities associated with Frances, who in reality held power only as a parent, have also tellingly been applied to Queen Elizabeth I. Rumours sprang up shortly after Elizabeth’s death that her sexual organs were deformed. In 1985 a doctor went so far as to claim Elizabeth was genetically male: a theory that persists, supported by such "evidence" as Elizabeth’s mental toughness. Jane's own tragedy has, meanwhile, taken on aspects of the modern misery memoir: all broken taboos, high sales and false memories. The epitaph beneath Frances's effigy observes that "true worth alone survives the tomb". In the next world perhaps: in this one Frances is traduced.

THIS ARTICLE IS DRAWN FROM MORE EXTENSIVE MATERIAL IN LEANDA DE LISLE'S BEST SELLING TRIPLE BIOGRAPHY: THE SISTERS WHO WOULD BE QUEEN; THE TRAGEDY OF MARY, KATHERINE AND LADY JANE GREY

THE DAILY EXPRESS: Margaret Beaufort; The Red Queen

With the kitsch BBC drama the White Queen moving to its conclusion Margaret Beaufort is the villainess viewers love to hate. A frigid fanatic in high necklines, she is the ultimate tiger mother. A woman willing even to commit child murder as she plots her son Henry Tudor’s path to the throne. But this is a depiction shaped by centuries of sexual and religious bigotry, and by our still ambivalent attitudes to powerful women.

Female historians and novelists may claim a sisterly empathy for historical women, but all too many of them are willing to plunder misogynistic myths to write their lives. And Margaret Beaufort is not their only victim.

I first noticed how readily writers will-use and re-work old myths when I was researching the life of the so-called ‘ Nine Day’s Queen’, Lady Jane Grey, executed aged sixteen in 1553. Eighteenth and nineteenth century stories and images depicting Jane’s mother as a man eating child abuser were being re-hashed. They claimed her ambition led to her daughter’s death, casting her in the role of a wicked Queen to Jane’s Snow White. It is a version of history that sends out a message that good girls are helpless, while bad ones are ambitious.

In the Tudor period, and for centuries afterwards, it was considered wrong and unnatural for women to wield power. It followed that the kind of woman who sought power was also unnatural – so how to depict them? Well, what could be more unnatural, more against a woman’s proper nature, than the abuse of children? It seems no co-incidence that Margaret Beaufort stands accused of planning the deaths of the ‘White Queen’s’ young sons, the so-called ‘Princes in the Tower’, to clear the path for Henry Tudor to be King.

The irony is that the real Margaret Beaufort was what we would consider to be an abused child. She was married at twelve and was so small and slight that her son’s birth when she was thirteen nearly killed her. She proved unable to have further children and for the next twenty-five years Margaret was a pawn and a victim of vicious power politics.

It was the beginning of the Wars of the Roses, a struggle between cousins, in which the ‘white rose’ House of York, fought for supremacy over the ‘red rose’ House of Lancaster - the family from which Margaret came. When the white rose triumphed Margaret’s sole hope for Henry was that he have the right to inherit his father’s properties and titles, and live in safety in England. But this was denied her.

Aged fourteen Henry was forced to flee into exile from the Yorkist king Edward IV in fear of his life. Margaret worked hard to get a royal pardon for her son so he could come home. She had not succeeded when in 1483 Edward IV died after catching a cold while out fishing. But everything now changed. Shockingly, Edward IV’s sons, aged twelve and ten, were placed in the Tower by their uncle, who claimed the throne as Richard III.

Richard showed no more inclination than Edward IV to allow Henry Tudor home. But, when the princes vanished that summer and rumours emerged that Richard had ordered their deaths, Margaret saw an opportunity. She suggested to the mother of the princes– the ‘white queen’, Elizabeth Woodville - that she agree to marry her eldest daughter to Henry Tudor. Edwardian loyalists could then combine with remaining Lancastrians to overthrow Richard and make Henry King.

Less than two years later Richard III was killed in battle at Bosworth, and Henry Tudor was crowned. Margaret – the Red Queen – would gain huge political influence and become one of the richest women in England. Clearly she had benefited from the disappearance of the princes. But it would not be until 110 years after her death that she would be accused of child murder: the accusations first arose only during the reign of the witch-burning misogynist, James I.

This was the era of the Stuarts, the Tudor line was defunct and so it was possible to re-assess Henry Tudor’s enemy, Richard III, in a more positive light. That meant finding someone other that Richard responsible for the disappearance of his nephews. Cases in which children disappear are haunting, as we have seen in such modern mysteries as the vanishing of Maddie McCann –and no one had forgotten the story of the Princes in the Tower.

Margaret was an easy target, in part because of the praise that had been lavished on her by her priestly confessor, John Fisher. England had undergone the Reformation. Stuart England was thoroughly Protestant and Margaret’s Catholic spirituality was now condemned, while her intelligence and toughness of character were regarded with equal suspicion.

In 1646, the con man, George Buck Esquire, who was passing off a history composed in 1619 by a great uncle as his own work, published his uncle’s accusation that Margaret was a ‘subtle and politic lady’ who had sought to kill the princes with poison and sorcery to clear the way for Henry. And, as we see in the White Queen TV drama, it is as a child murderer that she is being portrayed again today.

Margaret had become immensely powerful after Henry was crowned, and powerful women are still judged unsympathetic. There also remains a visceral anti Catholicism in England that has been re-enforced by modern fears of Islamism. In the White Queen Margaret is depicted as a fanatic, ever invoking God. Yet the strict religious devotions of Margaret Beaufort’s old age were commonplace amongst noblewomen of her time. They marked an effort to look beyond the ruthless political culture into which they had been born, to understand Christ’s example of love. Portraying Margaret as a religious nutcase shows an arrogant blindness to the culture of our past. That is worrying in a shrinking world when we need to be able to understand other viewpoints, other beliefs.

This summer, in which we have celebrated the birth of a future king of England to the Cambridges, Kate and William, and we should remember the thirteen-year old Margaret Beaufort who bore Henry Tudor with a little more generosity. Here was a girl who took control of her destiny, who saved her son from exile and danger, and who helped to found the Tudor dynasty. Not a villainess at all, but a survivor and a heroine.

THIS ARTICLE WAS DRAWN FROM A MORE DETAILED ACCOUNT IN LEANDA DE LISLE'S BOOK TUDOR: THE FAMILY STORY (1437-1603) PUBLISHED IN THE U.S. UNDER THE TITLE TUDOR: PASSION, MANIPULATION, MURDER, THE STORY OF ENGLAN;DS MOST NOTORIOUS ROYAL FAMILY (2013)

A version of this article was published in the Daily Express 16/8/13

THE DAILY EXPRESS: Flodden, Katherine of Aragon and Margaret Tudor

The battle of Flodden, which took place in Northumberland five hundred years ago, is not only a story of fighting men. It is also a tale of two Queens. Margaret Tudor, Queen of Scots, who lost her husband in the battle on 9 September 1513 and Katherine of Aragon, Queen, Captain General of the English army that killed him. It is a story of a devastating defeat, but also of ultimate triumph.

For Margaret Tudor it began in August 1513, when she bid her husband James IV of Scots, farewell at Linlithgow palace, West Lothian. Legend has it that she begged her husband not to leave her, and was angry that he intended to make war on her brother, Henry VIII. In reality, her chief concern was for her husband’s life. Born an English princess, she was, as she often asserted, ‘a Scotswoman now’.

The relationship between the royal brothers in law had broken down after Henry VIII had claimed he was the rightful overlord of Scotland. A furious King James was determined to punish him, and when Henry had led his army into France in June 1513, looking for glory in a continental war, James had decided to plan his own invasion – of England. Having parted from Margaret Tudor, James crossed the border into Northumberland on 24 August at the head of the greatest army ever gathered in Scotland.

Fortress after fortress fell to the Scottish king. But Henry VIII was certain his wife, Katherine of Aragon, would be a match for James. She was the daughter of Queen Isabella of Castile, who had thrown the Moors out of Spain. He had made her Captain General of his armies in England his absence, and Katherine, busy organizing artillery and gunners, wrote to re-assure him that she was ready for a fight and, ‘My heart is very good to it’.

Not that Katherine underestimated James. The French had trained large numbers of his men in the use of the Swiss pike: fearsome weapons, eighteen to twenty-two feet long, that could stop a cavalry charge in its tracks. When her battlefield commander, the Earl of Surrey, reached James’s army at Flodden, Katherine was already preparing a defensive line further south, in case Surrey lost to the Scottish king.

The battle of Flodden began after days of appalling weather, with the Scots pikemen advancing down Branxton hill. The wind and rain battered them and the soft ground broke up their formation, but they remained in good order, walking in eerie silence. The English described them as ‘Germanic’

At Linlithgow palace Margaret Tudor could only await news from the battlefield. A room in the northwest Tower, with sweeping views across open countryside, is that, at which, in romantic tradition, Margaret scanned the horizon for the expected messengers. Rumours of many dead reached Edinburgh on 10 September and it was not long before Margaret learned the full, and terrible, story.

The English had counter attacked the pikemen on foot, using the bill, a simple hook on the end of a pole. This allowed them to strike the Scots at close quarters. But, one Englishman complained, the Scots were ‘such large and strong men, they would not fall when four or five bills struck them’. A desperate struggle had been fought ‘with great slaughter, sweating and travail’ on both sides before the battle had ended in defeat for the Scots. Ten thousand of them lay slain: ‘The prime o' our land.. cauld in the clay..’ is how they are remembered in the pipers lament ‘The Flowers of the Forest’, played today at the funerals of fallen servicemen.

The dead included earls, lords and even bishops. But the most significant was Margaret’s husband. His body had fallen near the royal Scottish banner of the red lion rampant. King James’s left hand was almost severed, his throat gashed, and an arrow was shot through his lower jaw. The English commander, Surrey, was rewarded for the English victory over James with the restoration of the family title, Duke of Norfolk and chose a new augmentation to his heraldic arms. Still used by the family, it recalls the spectacle of James’s corpse: a red lion rampant, with an arrow though its head.

That night the English soldiers, who had lost 4000 of their countrymen, toasted their victory with Scottish beer - which they commented was surprisingly good. Katherine of Aragon, meanwhile, wrote to her sister in law to assure her, ‘The Queen of England for the love she bears the Queen of Scots would gladly send a servant to comfort her’ in her grief. But to Henry, Katherine expressed a rather different emotion - pride that she had helped to kill a king.

Katherine had wanted to send James’s head to France, ‘but’ she complained, ‘our Englishmen’s hearts would not suffer it’. Instead she sent Henry the chequered surcoat taken from James’s body, which she suggested he use as his banner. Looking at it, ‘rent and torn with blood’ Henry said James had, ‘paid a heavier penalty for his perfidy than we would have wished’. And years later, when Henry planned to divorce Katherine and marry Anne Boleyn, he still recalled with trepidation her ability to ‘carry on a war’ as ‘fiercely as her mother had done in Spain’.

James’s body was brought to London from Flodden and paraded through the streets slung over a horse. Katherine received it at the Carthusian Monastery at Sheen, and later, at Henry’s request, the Pope gave permission for it to be buried at St Paul’s. But, for whatever reason, Henry never buried James, and in the reign of Henry’s daughter, Elizabeth I, the body was still at Sheen, where it was found cast, ‘ into an old waste room, amongst old timber, stone, lead, and other rubble'.

Later some Elizabethan workmen cut off James’s head ‘for their foolish pleasure’. It still had his red beard when a Londoner rescued it, keeping it in his house, saying it smelled nice. Eventually he had it buried at St Michael’s Church, Wood Street, in the City of London. The Church burned down in the Great Fire of 1666 and today a pub marks the burial spot of the last king to die in battle on British soil.

Margaret Tudor’s life after her husband’s death was not to be an easy one. Under the terms of James’s will his ‘most dearest spouse’, became regent of Scotland for their infant son, making her the first Tudor woman to rule a kingdom. But it was a position from which she was soon ousted. The Scots never really forgave her for being English born. It was through Margaret, however, that the Scottish crown would eventually triumph over that of England, for in dynastic matters having children was still more important than winning battles.

It was Margaret, and not Katherine of Aragon, whose heirs would carry forward the royal bloodlines of England, as well as Scotland. In 1603, on the death of Elizabeth I, Margaret’s great-grandson united the crowns of England and Scotland as James VI & I. The ghosts of the Flodden were laid to rest at last, with peace between the once warring kingdoms, a victory for all.

THIS ARTICLE WAS DRAWN FROM A MORE DETAILED ACCOUNT IN LEANDA DE LISLE'S BOOK TUDOR: THE FAMILY STORY (1437-1603) PUBLISHED IN THE U.S. UNDER THE TITLE TUDOR: PASSION, MANIPULATION, MURDER, THE STORY OF ENGLAN;DS MOST NOTORIOUS ROYAL FAMILY (2013)

THE SPECTATOR: A Tudor mystery unravels

The fate of Lady Mary Grey, Queen Elizabeth’s prisoner and a potential heir to the throne, has never been resolved. Now Leanda de Lisle tells all

Leanda de Lisle7 April 2010

The fate of Lady Mary Grey, Queen Elizabeth’s prisoner and a potential heir to the throne, has never been resolved. Now Leanda de Lisle tells all

At the Prime Minister’s country residence at Chequers, scribbles on the walls of the 12-foot prison room bear testimony to the dreary misery of the woman Elizabeth I had kept there. An heir to the throne, a potential English queen, now buried in obscurity.

If Lady Mary Grey is recalled today, it is as a historical footnote. She was the dwarf who married a giant, the curious youngest sister of the famous Lady Jane Grey. But Mary was a more significant figure than her stature in the literature suggests. And my discovery of lost manuscripts has helped me lay to rest a Tudor mystery that may interest the next prime minister, whoever that is, as he gazes at Mary’s portrait later this year. For centuries, no one has known what Queen Elizabeth did with poor Mary Grey’s body, but I have discovered where she was laid to rest.

When Elizabeth became Queen in 1558, Mary Grey followed her sister Katherine, the second of the three Grey girls, in line to the throne. This is not, of course, how history remembers it. Mary, Queen of Scots is the cousin we recall as Elizabeth’s heir. But Henry VIII had excluded the Stuart line of his elder sister Margaret from the succession and in their stead placed the heirs of his younger sister, Mary Rose Tudor — grandmother of the Greys.

If Henry’s will, backed by statute, had not existed, Mary, Queen of Scots would have had the superior right to Elizabeth. As the illegitimate daughter of Henry’s annulled marriage to Anne Boleyn, Elizabeth had no claim under the tradition of primogeniture. To accept Elizabeth’s right is to accept Katherine and Mary’s rights in line of succession. But contrary to the myth of Elizabeth as the great goddess of English Protestant nationalism, as a young Queen she preferred the claim of the Catholic, foreign, Queen of Scots to that of the Protestant, English, Grey girls.

The Stuart claim represented divine right over the power of parliament, and Elizabeth also perceived the Greys as posing a greater threat to herself. In particular, she feared that if Katherine or Mary Grey married and had sons while she did not, her own Protestant supporters would overthrow her in their favour. Indeed, they had form in this regard. Five years earlier, in 1553, King Henry’s son, the Protestant Edward VI, had cut his half-sisters, Mary and Elizabeth, out of his will, and bequeathed his throne to Lady Jane Grey. Other Protestants had backed his decision, principally because Mary Tudor was a Catholic, but also because the Tudor sisters were unmarried, while Jane had a husband. Jane was quickly overthrown by Mary Tudor, and later executed. But Elizabeth was determined to ensure the remaining Greys never married. And in this she proved entirely unsuccessful.

Pretty, blonde Katherine married secretly in 1560 Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford, son of the late Protector Somerset, and a descendent of Edward III. This perfectly matched royal couple proceeded to have sex wherever they could, several times a night, ‘sometimes on the one side of the bed, sometimes on the other’. Elizabeth learnt what had happened only when Katherine was eight months pregnant.

Preventing Katherine from continuing to sleep with her husband and producing sons proved impossible even when she was confined in the Tower — where sympathetic warders allowed some corridor creeping. But Elizabeth had her two children bastardised, and from 1563 Katherine was sent to remote country house prisons, never to see her husband again.

Enter the 19-year-old Lady Mary Grey. Described by the Spanish ambassador as ‘crook-backed and very ugly’, Mary was so small it has been conjectured she was a dwarf. But in 1565 she was in love with Thomas Keyes, the gigantic sergeant porter in charge of palace security. In marrying a commoner, as she did in a candlelit room at Whitehall palace, she effectively (if not legally) ruled herself out of the succession. She may have hoped that the Queen would therefore forgive her actions. But when the news emerged in August such hopes proved misplaced.

‘Here is an unhappy chance and monstrous,’ declared Mary’s kinsman, William Cecil, of the union between the ‘least of all the court’ and its ‘biggest gentleman’. The Queen had ordered Keyes be locked in the Fleet prison. Mary Grey, like her sister, was instead to be sent to a series of country houses. The first was Chequers, where she was kept in a room on the north-east corner with two windows to gaze out of at the sky. Graffiti of a winged creature marks the walls, where her letters, begging Elizabeth for freedom, are framed.

The gigantic Keyes was even worse off, living in agony in a cramped cell until he was released, a broken man, in 1570. He asked to retire with Mary to Kent, but this was refused. He died the following year. Mary took the news ‘grievously’. She was painted that autumn defiantly showing off the wedding ring that had cost her her freedom, and with carnations and gillyflowers in her hair for love, fidelity and memory. But while Katherine had died in despair in 1568, Mary survived to be freed in 1573.

Mary Grey left her last gaoler with little more than ‘her books and rubbish’ (as he reported). But eventually she set up her own small household in Aldersgate. She even appeared at court, where she must have been in danger of resembling a bumblebee in her brilliant yellow kirtle and black gowns. Mary, Queen of Scots, meanwhile, had been imprisoned in England since shortly after Katherine’s death. She now posed the principle danger to Elizabeth. But following her execution in 1587 Elizabeth protected the interests of her son, James VI of Scotland. These efforts helped ensure his accession in 1603. The legal bars were lifted retrospectively in 1604.

The last of the Grey sisters, now conveniently forgotten, was, by then, long dead. We don’t know what Mary died of on 20 April 1578, only that she requested that the Queen have her buried where she thought ‘most fit’. No one knew where that was until I discovered her funeral details had been miscatalogued at the College of Arms as those of an insignificant daughter of the Earl of Kent.

The manuscripts reveal that the funeral took place on 14 May, with Mary’s body brought in procession to Westminster Abbey. The heralds had done great banners of arms and a dozen poor women, dressed in black, led the procession. There were four pallbearers for the tiny coffin on its chariot, and behind it the mourners. The names of those who attended the funeral are a roll call of figures from the lives of the sisters. There is Mistress Tilney — Elizabeth Tilney had escorted the teenage Jane Grey to the scaffold. There is Sir Owen Hopton, Katherine’s last gaoler, with whom she left her dying pleas to Elizabeth to be merciful to her children. There is also the friend who had eavesdropped on Mary’s wedding through a door, too frightened to attend the forbidden marriage.

Mary Grey was buried in the tomb of her mother Frances, Duchess of Suffolk, at Chequers, without her own name inscribed on it. But there she lies still, surrounded by the kings from whom she was descended and the queens whose rivals the sisters once were. Perhaps the new PM will pay her a visit. The Sisters who would be Queen: The Tragedy of Mary, Katherine and Lady Jane Grey by Leanda de Lisle is published by Harper Press at £9.99.

This article first appeared in the print edition of The Spectator magazine, dated April 10, 2010

MAIL ON SUNDAY: Loved-up then locked up by the Virgin Queen: The story of Katherine and Mary Grey

13 July 2010

Few people remember them today, but nearly 500 years ago Katherine and Mary Grey – sisters of the doomed Lady Jane Grey – posed such a threat to the sovereignty of Elizabeth I that she took drastic measures to ensure they would never reign, as Leanda de Lisle reveals

Lady Mary Grey defiantly shows off her wedding ring in a portrait painted in the wake of her husband¿s death. It now hangs at Chequers, the Prime Minister's country home

The discovery of manuscripts lost for 400 years has given me the answer to a small Tudor mystery. What did Elizabeth I do with the body of her forgotten heir, Lady Mary Grey – a princess whose life is buried in obscurity, along with the secrets it carries?

If Mary Grey is recalled today, it is as a historical footnote. She was the dwarf who married a giant, the curious youngest sister of the tragic ‘nine days queen’, Lady Jane Grey. But Mary was a more significant figure than her stature in literature suggests. Under the will of Henry VIII, backed by statute, Mary and her two elder sisters, Katherine and Jane, were the heirs to his daughter Elizabeth. They represent an English dynasty that never was.

The eldest sister, Jane, is the best remembered. She was 16, ‘young and lovely’ when King Henry’s son Edward VI bequeathed her the throne in 1553. The pious Edward preferred Jane, granddaughter of Henry’s sister Mary, to both his half-sisters: the Catholic Mary Tudor and Elizabeth, whose mother Anne Boleyn had been executed on charges of betraying his father with numerous men, including her own brother.

Mary Grey was eight when Jane became ‘Jane the Queen’ with the support of the Protestant elite. Although well-educated, she had not yet started learning Latin and Greek as her sisters had. But she was, like Jane, a clever girl, and might have followed suit if it were not for the catastrophe that befell the family. Just nine days after Jane acceded the throne, Mary Tudor overthrew her in a coup that had popular support. Jane was tried for treason, convicted, and executed in the aftermath of a counter-revolt led by her father the following year. The shocking spectacle in the Tower of the blindfolded teenager feeling for the block and crying out for help on that cold February morning appalled even contemporaries accustomed to the horror of beheadings.

Lady Jane Grey (left), who reigned for just nine days before she was overthrown by Mary Tudor in a spectacular coup. Her very fertile sister Katherine posed a threat to the Virgin Queen, Elizabeth I

Mary and Katherine were later obliged to wait at court upon the Queen who had ordered the execution of their sister. But Mary Grey guarded the memory of her sister Jane. As an adult she kept with her a copy of John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, which described Jane’s pitiful end and recorded her last letter to Katherine. Jane asked Katherine to ‘despise the flesh’ and prepare for judgment and death. But Katherine was very much a creature of the flesh, as Mary would prove to be too.

Loving and pretty, Katherine longed for the happiness of a love-match marriage – a dream she would pursue to her destruction at Queen Elizabeth’s hand. For just as Mary Grey never forgot Jane, neither did Elizabeth, who became Queen when Mary Tudor died in 1558. Elizabeth feared that the Protestant elite, who had backed Jane as Queen in 1553, might one day overthrow her in favour of one of the remaining Grey girls. The most likely trigger would be if either Katherine or Mary were to produce a male heir, while she did not. Elizabeth was therefore determined that neither sister should marry.

In 1560, however, the 20-year-old Katherine wed, in secret, the handsome ‘Ned’ Seymour, Earl of Hertford. The transcripts of later interviews in the Tower describe their wedding night in intimate detail. Katherine married Ned in his bedroom at a house on the Thames. They toasted their wedding quickly and rushed to bed, making love twice: first on one side of the bed then the other. Katherine was naked save for a fashionable headdress. Then they dashed back to court, anxious not to be missed.

Katherine had sex in nearly all of the Queen’s palaces

Katherine tried to protect her younger sister Mary by keeping what she had done from her. But over the following months she had sex in nearly all of the Queen’s palaces. When she was eight months pregnant, Elizabeth finally discovered what had been going on. Preventing Katherine from continuing to have sex and producing sons proved impossible even when she was confined in the Tower, where sympathetic warders allowed some ‘corridor creeping’. But Elizabeth had Katherine’s two children bastardised, and from 1563 Katherine was banished to remote country house prisons.

Even though the unmarried Virgin Queen had left the fertile Katherine to rot, Mary Grey envied the happiness her sister had known. In 1565, when she was 19, a widower with several children called Thomas Keyes began courting her. Mary Grey was very far from fitting the traditional idea of a princess. She was so short it has been suggested she may have been a dwarf, and the Spanish ambassador described her cruelly as ‘crook backed and very ugly’. But pretty or not, Mary combined the best characteristics of both her sisters, with Jane’s courage and Katherine’s passion.

Thomas Keyes, who held the post of sergeant porter, in charge of palace security, was a huge man. One courtier later described it as ‘monstrous’ that the ‘least of all the court’ should marry ‘the biggest gentlemen of this court’. But marry they did, by candlelight in Keyes’s quarters at Whitehall Palace, on 16 July that year. Mary’s best friend, her cousin Margaret Arundell, was so frightened that she listened at the door rather than witness the forbidden ceremony.

A detail from Paul Delaroche’s 1833 painting The Execution of Lady Jane Grey. She met her fate on the orders of Queen Mary, whose successor Elizabeth I, right, made sure that neither of Jane’s sisters would be queen

By marrying outside the nobility Mary was effectively (if not legally) ruling herself out of the succession. She must have hoped, therefore, that Elizabeth would forgive her actions. But when gossip about Mary’s marriage reached Elizabeth’s ears just weeks later, these hopes proved misplaced. Elizabeth ordered Keyes to be incarcerated in Fleet prison, while Mary was sent to a series of country house jails. The first of these was Chequers, now the Prime Minister’s country residence. There she was kept in a 12ft room where her unanswered letters, begging Elizabeth for freedom, hang framed on the walls today.

Katherine, separated from her elder son as well as her husband, began to despair of ever seeing them again. A horrified jailer recorded how she gradually lost the will to live, dying in 1568, aged 28, of what looks very like a broken heart. Mary’s misery at losing a second sister was compounded, meanwhile, by fear for her husband’s health. It was reported that the ‘bulk of his body being such’ Keyes was in agony in his ‘noisome and narrow prison room’. He was released only in 1570, by then gravely weakened. He asked to retire with Mary to Kent, but Elizabeth refused the request and he died the following year without seeing her again.

Mary’s jailer reported that she took the news of his death ‘grievously’. A portrait of her that hangs at Chequers, painted that autumn, has her defiantly showing off her wedding ring. In her hair, meanwhile, she wears carnations for love, fidelity and remembrance. Denied even the consolation of caring for her orphaned stepchildren, Mary Grey now became an increasingly difficult prisoner. Her jailer wrote frantic letters to the Privy Council, sometimes twice in one day, begging for her removal ‘for the quietness of my poor wife’. In 1573 she was, at last, freed.

Mary was held at Chequers, where her letters, begging Elizabeth for freedom, hang on the walls today

Mary set up her own small household in the shadow of the Tower where Jane had been beheaded. There she employed one of Katherine’s former servants. She had asked Ned to send him to her, ‘for my sister’s sake’. She devoted her time to her stepchildren, growing especially close to one of them, Jane Merrick, who named her daughter after her. Sometimes Mary was invited to court, where the diminutive princess must have resembled a bumble bee in her brilliant yellow kirtle and black gowns.

It was another, better known Mary who now posed the principal danger to Elizabeth – Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots. The Stuart line, descended from King Henry’s elder sister, was excluded from the English succession in his will and by law. But the destruction of the Greys (descended from Henry’s younger sister) had made the foreign Stuart claim a powerful one. The consequences would be fatal: Mary, Queen of Scots was executed in 1587. But Elizabeth helped secure the succession of Mary’s son, King James, in 1603, in preference to Katherine’s heir, and against English statute.

The last of the Grey sisters was, by then, long dead and conveniently forgotten. Mary died, possibly of a form of pneumonia, in 1578, having requested only that the Queen have her buried where she thought ‘most fit’. No one knew where that was until I discovered her funeral details. They lay wrongly catalogued at the College of Arms as those of an insignificant daughter of the Earl of Kent – hidden, perhaps for centuries, in plain view. The manuscripts reveal that the Queen had her buried at Westminster Abbey, as befitted Mary’s royal status.

The funeral took place on 14 May, with Mary’s body brought in procession to the Abbey. There were just four pallbearers for the tiny coffin, and behind it walked the mourners. The names of those who attended the funeral are a roll call of figures from the lives of the sisters. There is a Mistress Tilney – the loyal lady in waiting who had walked with Jane to the scaffold. There is Katherine’s last jailer, with whom she left a ring for Ned inscribed, ‘While I lived, Yours’ and a message for the Queen pleading that she be kind to her children. Finally there is Mary’s friend, Margaret Arundell.

Mary was buried in the tomb of her mother, Frances, Duchess of Suffolk, without her own name inscribed on it. But there she lies today in the Abbey surrounded by the kings from whom she was descended and the queens whose rivals she and her sisters had been.

THIS ARTICLE IS DRAWN FROM MORE EXTENSIVE MATERIAL IN LEANDA DE LISLE'S BEST SELLING TRIPLE BIOGRAPHY: THE SISTERS WHO WOULD BE QUEEN; THE TRAGEDY OF MARY, KATHERINE AND LADY JANE GREY

BBC'S THE WHITE QUEEN: Behind the fantasy the Real Story of Margaret Beaufort, the 'Red Queen' (blog exclusive)

It’s been a story of murder, fanaticism and the hunger for power. At its heart was the bewitching White Queen, Elizabeth Woodville, but also a villainess viewers loved to hate: Margaret Beaufort. A tiger mother, maniacally plotting her son Henry Tudor’s path to the throne, she merged triumphant to found the Tudor dynasty. But the genuine Margaret was the true heroine of the real-life drama, a woman whose story has been buried by prejudice.

The portrayal of Margaret in the White Queen was of a frigid fanatic, always invoking God. This taps into our modern fears of oppressive Islamism. But it is a depiction shaped by centuries of sexual and religious bigotry in England, and by our still ambivalent attitudes to powerful women.

The story of the real Margaret began when she was the victim of a child marriage, aged twelve. Her twenty-four year old husband, Edmund Tudor, was half brother of her cousin, the mentally ill Henry VI. The marriage did not last long. Edmund Tudor died of plague the following year, but he left his young widow, six months pregnant.

It was the beginning of the Wars of the Roses, a struggle between cousins, in which the ‘white rose’ House of York, fought for supremacy over the failing kingship of Henry VI, from the ‘red rose’ House of Lancaster. Margaret needed a protector and so she sought refuge with her brother-in-law, Jasper Tudor, at Pembroke castle. There she delivered her baby, Henry Tudor in 1457. But the thirteen year old was so small her body would never recover, and she was left unable to have further children.

In the White Queen, Margaret had sexual feelings for Jasper, and hates her mother, who arranges her next marriage with a man called Henry Stafford. In fact she loved her mother, and Jasper arranged her second marriage – taking her to meet her future father in law only a month after the birth that had almost killed her.

Margaret’s second marriage proved happy, nonetheless. Stafford was devoted to his young wife, who was described as easy to talk to, a woman who never forgot a kindness, who read extensively, and managed her estates efficiently. But their life was shattered in 1461 when the eighteen-year old Edward IV of York overthrew the mad King Henry VI of Lancaster.

Margaret’s five-year old son, Henry Tudor, was taken from her to be raised by a supporter of the House of York. The land and titles he had inherited from his father were confiscated. But the hope was held out that these would be restored if the family proved loyal to King Edward. It was this inheritance, not any ambitions for Henry Tudor to be king, that Margaret would fight long and hard for.

Margaret’s task was made easier when King Edward married the beautiful commoner, Elizabeth Woodville. The ‘White Queen’ was related to Margaret’s husband and King Edward now permitted her to see her son. Aged ten, Henry Tudor was a self-possessed boy of average height, with a slight cast to his blue eyes. His mother was relieved that peace – even a Yorkist peace - meant he was safe. But two years later Edward’s cousin and once closest ally, the ambitious Warwick ‘the Kingmaker’, rebelled against him.

It was said of Margaret that she never let opportunities pass her by, and she tried to use the new political situation to get her son back. For a time she succeeded. When Warwick the Kingmaker defeated Edward IV in 1471 and restored Henry VI, her son came home for a few precious weeks. But the tide of war soon changed.

Warwick the Kingmaker, and Henry VI’s son, were killed in two key battles in 1472. Edward IV then determined to finish off the House of Lancaster. Henry VI was murdered in the Tower, with Edward claiming the sick old man had died of grief for his son. Edward’s next plan was to capture Henry VI’s half-nephew, Henry Tudor.

Now aged fourteen, Henry fled England with Jasper Tudor. He was to spend the next twelve years exiled in Brittany, never seeing his mother, and living in the constant fear that one day the Duke of Brittany would hand him over to Edward IV and his death.

Margaret’s beloved husband had died of battle wounds suffered in the recent conflicts, but she re-married quickly, to Thomas, Lord Stanley, a member of Edward’s Council, hoping to regain the king’s favour. This proved difficult for the name ‘Lancaster’ continued to pose a threat to Edward. The murdered Henry VI had come back to haunt him in the guise of a popular saint.

Ordinary people remembered the mentally ill Henry VI as an innocent, and believed his suffering in life gave him insight into their own problems now he was dead. They prayed to him and the cult of King Henry the Saint swept England, with miracles reported widely. The last thing Edward wanted was the return of Henry Tudor, the surviving relic of the House of Lancaster.

The turning point for Margaret came in April 1483. Edward had grown obese and sexually dissolute, and a cold caught out fishing killed him off, aged only forty. England was left with a child king – his twelve-year-old son Edward V. Many assumed that the boy’s royal uncle, Richard, would act as Protector, ruling until Edward V came of age. But Elizabeth Woodville, and her family were determined to keep exclusive control over her son.

Fearful of Woodville power, Richard – portrayed as a doe-eyed softie in the White Queen - fought back. Claims were made that Edward IV had married Elizabeth Woodville bigamously, and in June Edward V and his ten-year old brother were declared illegitimate. The children were locked in the Tower and Richard was crowned as Richard III. It was sometime that summer that the princes in the Tower vanished.

The question of what had happened to the princes remains today one of history’s great murder mysteries, their disappearance as haunting as modern cases of missing children like Ben Needham and Madeleine McCann.

In the nearest contemporary accounts Richard is accused of ordering their deaths, with the boys suffocated, drowned, or their arteries cut. There were also theories that one or both of the princes escaped. In more modern times it has been argued that Richard III had spirited his nephews abroad, or to a safe place nearer home, where he hoped they would live in obscurity.

For contemporaries the fact Edward V still had support as king gave Richard a strong motive for killing the princes. But if he did kill them why did he not display their bodies and claim they had died of natural causes, as his brother had done after the murder of Henry VI? The answer, overlooked by previous historians, is not that the princes were alive, or that Richard was innocent, but that Richard was anxious to avoid a religious cult growing up around them as it had around Henry VI.

In England we have no equivalent today to the religious shrine at Lourdes in France, still visited by thousands looking for miracles. But we remember the crowds outside Buckingham Palace after the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. Imagine that enthusiasm and grief in pilgrims visiting the tombs of two young princes. It would have been extremely dangerous to Richard III, who had taken their throne. ‘Disappearing’ them meant there was no grave to become a focus for a cult, and no relics either.

Nevertheless Richard III needed Elizabeth Woodville to know the princes were dead to forestall plots against him, raised in their name. According to one account, when Elizabeth was told of her sons’ murders, ‘she wept, she cried out loud, and with lamentable shrieks made all the house ring’. She wanted vengeance and to get it she agreed to Margaret Beaufort’s proposal that she marry her daughter, Elizabeth of York, to Henry Tudor. Supporters of the old House of Lancaster would then combine with the Edwardian Yorkists to bring Richard III down. For Margaret this was the only certain way to save Henry from Richard, who was as likely to kill him as Edward IV.

In August 1485 the twenty-eight year old Henry Tudor sailed from France and confronted Richard III at the battle of Bosworth. We now know, following the excavation of Richard’s body at Leicester, that Richard really did have the twisted spine dismissed for so long as Tudor propaganda (and not shown in the White Queen). He stood as short as four foot eight. But Richard bravely hacked his way on foot towards Henry Tudor, like a furious human pretzel. At the last minute Margaret’s brother-in-law, William Stanley, and his men galloped to save Henry – and Richard was killed.

Henry was crowned Henry VII, first king of the Tudor dynasty and married Elizabeth of York, combining the red rose and the white in a new ‘union’ badge. The first person Henry VII then turned to for advice in ruling his kingdom was his mother. She was rewarded too with the right to mange her own affairs, something usually forbidden to married women.

Later Margaret separated amicably from Lord Stanley choosing to live independently, writing books and presiding over a regional court in the Midlands, wielding real power. Known always as ‘the King’s Mother’, she would sign herself Margaret R, which may have stood for her title, Countess of Richmond, but could also mean Regina or ‘Queen’.

Meanwhile Elizabeth Woodville was retired to a monastery, and when she died in 1492 she was given a quiet funeral. David Starkey argues that Margaret resented her rival status. Others have suggested she was sent to the monastery after plotting against Henry. But the truth is that Henry VII merely wanted her out of sight and mind.

It was important to Henry that he be accepted as king in his own right, not one shared with his wife, and so he suppressed reminders of the past glories of the House of York. He had done nothing to find the bodies of the princes in the Tower, fearing a cult as much as Richard had. But Henry paid the price for failing to prove the children were dead when a pretender appeared in Europe, claiming to be the younger of the princes in the Tower and the rightful king of England.

Margaret turned to God to pray for her son as he faced rebellions and invasion attempts on behalf of the pretender. She believed God had shaped the extraordinary path of their lives, and would protect them now. In the end the pretender was captured and executed. Henry VII would die in his bed only after a long illness in 1509. Margaret was left to stage-manage the accession of her grandson, Henry VIII, but she died shortly afterwards

It was said at Margaret’s funeral that all of England had reason to weep. She had been charitable to the poor, a great patron of the universities, and had loved her friends and family dearly. But in post Reformation Protestant England Margaret’s Catholic spirituality was hated and her intelligence was regarded with equal suspicion. She was condemned as a ‘politic and subtle lady’ and accused of killing the princes in the Tower with sorcery to clear the way for her son.

Today the old slander that Margaret was responsible for the princes’ deaths is becoming fashionable again. Perhaps because there are no portraits of the young Margaret, novelists and film-makers project the nun-like piety of her old age back into her youth. Powerful women are also still judged unsympathetic.

But in a summer in which another future king of England has been born we should remember the thirteen year old who bore Henry Tudor. Here was a girl who took control of her destiny, a mother who saved her son, the avenger of the House of Lancaster and founder of the Tudor dynasty: the Red Queen. A true life heroine

BBC HISTORY MAGAZINE: The Faking of Jane Grey

The teenage Queen, Lady Jane Grey has been mythologised, even fetishised, as the innocent victim of adult ambition. The legend was encapsulated by the French Romantic artist Paul Delaroche in his 1833 historical portrait of Jane in white on the scaffold, an image with all the erotic overtones of a virgin sacrifice. But the legend also inspired a fraud: One that has fooled historians, art experts, and biographers, for over a hundred years.

A sixteenth century merchant gave us what was believed, until now, to be the only detailed, contemporary, description of Jane’s appearance. In a letter, he wrote an eyewitness account of a smiling, red haired girl, being processed to the Tower as Queen, on July 10th 1553. He was close enough to see that she was so small she had to wear stacked shoes or ‘chopines’ to give her height. Jane was overthrown nine days later, and, eventually, executed in the Tower from where she had reigned. But while the tragedy of her brutal death, at only sixteen, is real, the letter is an invention that obscures the significance of her reign.

The faked letter first made its appearance in Richard Patrick Boyle Davey’s 1909 biography ‘The Nine Days Queen, Lady Jane Grey & her Times’. Davey’s subject was already a popular one. The Victorians had lapped up the poignant tale of a child woman forced to be Queen, and despite this, later executed as a usurper. The letter, ‘discovered’ by Davey in the archives of Genoa, seemingly brought this tragic heroine to life. But in retrospect that should have sent alarm bells ringing, for the Jane the Victorians knew was already heavily fictionalised.

The historical Jane was a great grandchild of Henry VII. Highly intelligent and given a top flight Protestant education, she might have made a Queen consort to her fiercely Protestant cousin Edward VI, as her father hoped. But instead, on July 6th 1553, the dying Edward bequeathed her the throne, in place of his Catholic half sister, Mary Tudor. Thirteen days later Mary overthrew Jane, and she was duly tried for treason, found guilty and condemned.

Mary indicated she wished to pardon Jane. But Jane was executed, nevertheless, the following year. It was the aftermath to a rebellion in which she had played no part (although her father had). Why then did Mary sign Jane’s death warrant? The reason was indicated the day before Jane’s beheading. The Bishop of Winchester, Stephan Gardiner, reminded Mary it was leading Protestants who had opposed her rule in July 1553, and in the recent rebellion. Jane, who had condemned Catholicism as Queen, had continued to do so as a prisoner in the Tower. As such she posed a threat. It was for her religious stance that Jane would die, not solely for her father’s actions, or her reign as a usurper.

Aware that the Protestant cause would be damaged by its link to treason, Jane reminded people from the scaffold that while in law she was a traitor, she had merely accepted the throne she was offered, and was innocent of having sought it. From this kernal of truth the later image of Jane was spun. Protestant propagandists developed her claims to innocence, ascribing the events of 1553 to the personal ambitions of Jane’s father and father in law, rather than religion. Later, under Queen Elizabeth, treason came to be associated with Catholics, not Protestants, and the earlier history was forgotten.

The religious issue of 1553 concluded only in 1701, when it was made illegal for any Catholic to inherit the throne: a law that still stands. But Jane’s story continued to develop. Her ‘innocence’ was associated increasingly with the passivity deemed appropriate in a young girl. The sexual dimension to this is evident in Edward’s Young’s 1714 poem, The Force of Religion, which invited men to gaze as voyeurs on the pure Jane in her ‘private closet’. Jane’s mother, Frances, meanwhile, was reinvented as powerful, lustful and bullying: a wicked Queen to Jane’s Snow White.

By the nineteenth century Jane’s fictionalised life was enormously popular. But there was something still missing from her story: a face. With no contemporary images or descriptions, the public had to be content with Jane as imagined by artists. The most striking work remains Paul Delaroche’s portrait, The Execution of Lady Jane Grey, bequeathed to the nation by Lord Cheylesmore in 1902, (now part of a major exhibition at the National Gallery). Jane, blindfold, and feeling for the block, represents an apotheosis of female helplessness. Richard Davey seems to have spotted a need for an account of Jane appearance that matches its power. He claimed to have found it in a letter in Genoa, composed by the merchant, ‘Sir Baptist Spinola’.

The letter has been quoted in biographies ever since and used to argue the merits of ‘lost’ portraits of Jane. But I was concerned that Davey was the sole source for this letter. Researching my triple biography, The Sisters Who Would be Queen, I had discovered that Davey had invented evidence that Jane had a nanny and dresser with her in the Tower: characters inspired by earlier novels. I began a long search for the ‘Spinola’ letter, but never found it in Genoa or in any history predating 1909. And it became clear the letter is a fake that mixes details from contemporary sources, with fiction.

There was a contemporary merchant called Benedict Spinola and a soldier called Baptista Spinola. The description of Jane has echoes of the red-lipped girl in the Delaroche portrait, but resembles also a contemporary description of Mary Tudor, who was ‘of low stature…very thin; and her hair reddish.’ Jane’s mother carries her train in the letter, as was observed in 1553. The platform shoes or ‘chopines’ were taken from the Victorian historian Agnes Strickland, quoting Isaac D’Israeli. I can find no earlier source. But they are suggestive of Jane’s physical vulnerability: an element in the appeal of the abused child woman that remains so popular (we even find Jane raped in a recent novel).

The rest of Jane’s dress, described by Spinola as a gown of green velvet worn with a white headdress, was in colours traditionally worn by a monarch on the eve of their coronation. But they are also the colours of the illustration, ‘Lady Jane Grey in royal robes’, published in Ardern Holt’s 1882 ‘Fancy dresses described’. Significantly in Davey’s ‘The Tower of London’, published in 1910, he describes Jane’s dress as edged in ermine, as it was in Holt’s illustration: a detail overlooked by ‘Sir Baptist Spinola’.

Davey’s lies and the repetition of old myths are damaging. Because Jane’s reign was treated for so long as the product of the ambitions of a few men, or of Edward VI’s naïve hopes, it is regarded as a brief hiatus, of no consequence. But it is key to understanding the development of our constitutional history. And we have overlooked something else. The Tudor unease with women who hold power has never really gone away. In legend Jane is the good girl: weak and feminine; Frances is a bad woman: powerful and mannish. This is the lesson of the myths - one that historians have too willingly accepted.

According to the will of Henry VIII, it was the younger sister of the ill-fated Lady Jane Grey who would follow Elizabeth I to the throne of England. Yet few now know of the short, passionate and dangerous life of Katherine Grey, writes Leanda de Lisle.

Imagine you are 18. Your home is lost, your sister and father executed, but you have survived the reign of Mary Tudor to emerge as Queen Elizabeth’s heir and rival. In November 1558 such was the position of Lady Katherine Grey, sister of Jane, the Nine Days Queen. But Katherine’s dramatic life has been all but erased from national memory, along with one of the great love stories of English history.

To recover Katherine’s remarkable story, we must return to the dying months of the reign of Queen Mary, in the summer of 1558. Katherine was living in the royal household as a Maid of the Privy Chamber. An influenza outbreak was killing thousands across the country and a number of the queen’s ladies fell ill. When her friend Jane Seymour, niece and namesake of Henry VIII’s third wife, developed a fever, Katherine was permitted briefly to nurse her at the country house of Jane’s mother, Anne, Duchess of Somerset. Jane’s 19-year-old brother, ‘Ned’ Seymour, Earl of Hertford, was also there and, during that summer, a romance developed.

Hertford’s mother warned him that his attraction to Katherine was potentially dangerous. Queen Mary was ill and any match between Ned Hertford and Kath-erine posed a threat to her successor, Elizabeth. Under the will of Katherine’s great-uncle, Henry VIII, backed by statute, Katherine followed Elizabeth in line to the throne. This is not, of course, how history remembers it. Mary Queen of Scots is the cousin we recall as Elizabeth’s heir. But Henry VIII had excluded from the succession the entire Stuart line of his elder sister, Margaret of Scotland, and in their stead placed the heirs of his younger sister, Mary Tudor, Duchess of Suffolk, Katherine’s grandmother.

If Henry’s will, and the 1536 statute that supported it, had not existed, Mary, Queen of Scots would also had the superior right to Elizabeth. As the illegitimate daughter of Henry’s annulled marriage to Anne Boleyn, Elizabeth had no claim to the throne under the traditional rules of primogeniture. To accept Elizabeth’s right to become Queen is to accept Katherine’s right in line of succession. And that right would be strengthened by marriage. It was possible even that Elizabeth’s Protestant supporters would prefer a married Katherine to a virgin Elizabeth. Indeed, they had form in this regard.

Five years earlier King Henry’s son, the Protestant Edward VI, had cut his half sisters Mary and Elizabeth out of his will and bequeathed his throne instead to Katherine’s elder sister, Lady Jane Grey. Many Protestants backed his decision, principally because Mary was a Catholic. But also because the Tudor sisters were unmarried, while Jane Grey had a husband: Guildford Dudley, fourth son of John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland. Protestants in particular were dismayed by the prospect of female rule, which ran against traditional notions of hierarchy and (some argued) biblical teaching. A married Queen offered the possibility, at least, of a male heir. But to whom a Queen was married was of crucial importance.

Edward VI had expressed the fear that his sisters might marry foreigners, as England could thereby become part of a foreign empire. What he did not take into account was the hatred and envy the Dudleys inspired. Mary Tudor, supported by many ordinary people, had overthrown Jane Grey on July 19th 1553, a mere nine days after she was proclaimed Queen in London. But this success was of poor comfort to Elizabeth in the summer of 1558 as Mary’s health declined rapidly. Hatred of the Dudleys had helped Mary’s cause immeasurably, and Elizabeth was in love with Jane’s brother in law, Lord Robert Dudley. To complicate matters further he was a married man.

When Mary died Tudor in November 1558, one of Queen Elizabeth’s first actions was to demote Katherine from the Privy Chamber to the Presence Chamber. It sent out a clear message that those who wanted royal favour should not be too friendly with Katherine. But that summer Elizabeth was too busy pursuing her passion for Robert Dudley to notice the romance between Katherine and Hertford flourishing under her nose. The couple later remembered the royal progress of 1559 with its summer banquets and garden walks as the time when they fell in love. It was, however, Elizabeth’s devotion to Robert Dudley that was the talk of the court.

By the summer of 1560 many believed Elizabeth’s affection for Dudley’s would lead to her overthrow, and ambassadors and privy councillors were discussing the arrangement of a suitable future marriage for Katherine, as her heir. The Spanish hoped to see Katherine married to a Hapsburg. Elizabeth’s Councillors talked instead of the Earl of Arran, leader of the Scottish Protestants and the heir of Mary, Queen of Scots. Katherine had, in fact, already agreed in secret to marry Hertford, a promise sealed with ‘kissing, embracing and joining their hands together’ in his sister’s private closet at Whitehall. And Hertford, although young an inexperienced, had much to recommend him. A descendent of Edward III, he was also the son of Edward VI’s uncle, the Protector Somerset, who had introduced the Protestant religion to England.

Only circumstantial evidence remains to suggest who knew of Katherine’s romance, but her aunt’s widower, Henry Fitzalan, Earl of Arundel, appears to have been amongst them. At the time of Elizabeth’s accession Arundel had been amongst her suitors. Elizabeth had laughed off his attentions, and he was now pursuing Hertford’s sister, the teenage Lady Jane Seymour. If Elizabeth wouldn’t make him a King (and was riding for a fall with Dudley), Arundel hoped he could yet make a King’s brother in law. The most significant figure linked to the young couple was, however, Elizabeth’s Secretary of State, William Cecil, who was Katherine’s kinsman, and had begun his career in the household of Hertford’s father.

Cecil was a leading figure amongst those who were concerned about Elizabeth’s devotion to Robert Dudley. On September 6th 1560 he warned the Spanish ambassador that he, ‘clearly foresaw the ruin of the realm through Lord Robert’s intimacy with the Queen’. Twice Cecil repeated that he wished Dudley dead. That evening, however, it was Dudley’s wife, Amy Robsart, whose corpse was found lying at the foot of a short fight of stairs, in the house of a friend. The coroner’s jury, who later viewed Amy’s body, brought in a verdict of death by misadventure. It suggested suicide. But there was no shortage of people who were willing to believe that Dudley had killed her. Cecil’s great fear was that despite this Elizabeth would now marry him. Fortunately Elizabeth soon made it plain to him that she understood that this was impossible.

If Cecil had encouraged Hertford and Katherine’s relationship, as some later believed he had, he now advised Hertford to pull back. Dutifully Hertford ceased contact with Katherine and even flirted with another girl at court. But when Katherine wrote him a furious letter he feared he risked losing her if he put off for their marriage much longer. They married that December, with only his sister as witness. What followed, however, was to be detailed in the transcripts of later interviews in the Tower, which describe their wedding night in intimate detail. Katherine married Ned Hertford in his bedroom at a house on the Thames. They toasted their wedding briefly but Hertford’s sister, ‘perceiving them ready to go to bed’ soon left. They made love on one side of the bed and the other with Katherine naked save for a fashionable headdress. They got up briefly and then went back, to make love again before dashing back to court before they were missed.

Over the following months the couple met to have sex in many of the Queen’s palaces, as well as at Hertford’s London house. Katherine became pregnant, but her friend, Hertford’s sister died aged only nineteen in the very month her suspicions about her pregnancy began, and she couldn’t accept what was happening. With Hertford anxious to leave England on a trip around Europe, she ignored what her body was telling her and agreed he could go. Cecil, aware only that they were seeing each other, was anxious to keep them apart and explained to Katherine that Hertford leaving was for their own good. But as she reflected, Cecil’s advice had come to her too her too late.

Katherine was eight months pregnant and with the court on another summer progress, before she at last confessed to Robert Dudley that she was to have a child. She begged him to be her intercessor with the Queen. But he failed to mollify Elizabeth who threw Katherine in the Tower. Hertford, recalled from Europe, was also imprisoned, arriving at the Tower on September 5th 1561. Elizabeth suspected a plot, but had no idea who was involved. The Spanish ambassador believed Cecil was the prime mover behind Katherine’s marriage, and Arundel’s name was also mentioned. But the couple’s testimony revealed no evidence of anything behind their marriage, other than their own careless passion. As Elizabeth’s progress continued grimly through the eastern counties, meanwhile, she now also had to face the emissary of her better remembered, rival, Mary, Queen of Scots.

The Stuart Queen had just returned from France to the kingdom of her birth, left as a young child, but already on September 8th, her adviser, William Maitland of Lethington, had arrived at the ancient royal castle of Hertford where Elizabeth was based, carrying Mary’s letters. Scotland and fought and lost a war with England after Mary had laid claim to Elizabeth’s crown on the grounds that she had the right of primogeniture. Mary had, however, refused to ratify the peace treaty that demanded she now recognise Elizabeth’s claim as Queen. It appears she had a price for that clause – Elizabeth should name her as her heir, and not Katherine Grey.

Maitland found Elizabeth ‘To all appearances … falling away… extremely thin and the colour of a corpse’. It was clear the stress of discovering Katherine’s pregnancy had taken its toll on the Queen. The messages Maitland had brought with him would now pile more pressure on her. While the letters from Mary, Queen of Scots offered sisterly affection, the rest, sent by members of the Scots nobility, warned that the surest way to keep Scotland’s friendship was for Elizabeth to name Mary her successor. Maitland urged this last point strongly, only to have Elizabeth retort that she had expected a different message from Scotland: one concerning Mary’s willingness to ratify the treaty. As the interview continued, however, what emerged was that despite their differences, Elizabeth, the future goddess of Protestant, English nationalism, far preferred the claims of the Catholic, foreign, Mary to that of Katherine Grey.

Elizabeth told Maitland the succession was not a matter she wished to meddle in, in part, she hinted, because it would provoke a debate in England that would not be in Mary’s interest. And she assured him,

‘I here protest to you, in the presence of God, I for my part know no better [claim than the Queen of Scots] nor that I myself would prefer to her, or yet, to be plain with you, that case that might debar her from it’.

It was an extraordinary statement. Elizabeth had made it quite clear that she believed Mary’s rights of succession, under the tradition of primogeniture, were more important than those decided by English statue and her father’s will. Elizabeth understood what her father had not. By introducing Parliament into the divine process of the succession he had interfered with the notion of the divine right of a monarch to rule. Elizabeth feared that if she did not prove Protestant enough (and she had differed with Cecil and others about how Protestant her religious settlement should be), or simply if she failed to produce a son and a male succession, parliament, which had sealed her right, could be used also to legitimise her deposition. And Katherine, with her impeccable English Protestant heritage and marriage, was her likely replacement.

Elizabeth expressed nothing but bitterness to Maitland about Katherine and the third Grey sister, Lady Mary, ‘It is true’ she said, ‘that some of them have made declaration to the world that they are more worthy of [the crown] than either [the Queen of Scots] or I, by demonstrating that they are not barren, but able to have children’. But, Elizabeth claimed, the pregnant Katherine was unable to inherit because her father had been convicted of treason after his involvement in the 1554 revolt against Mary Tudor, which had led to his execution and that of Lady Jane Grey. It was a failed argument that had been used once by a cousin of the Greys, and it was a mark of Elizabeth’s desperation that she made it.

Maitland hoped that if he pressed Elizabeth further, she might even name Mary, Queen of Scots as her choice of heir. At his final audience, however, Elizabeth again reminded Maitland about the 1554 revolt against Mary Tudor. Protestant rebels, angered by Mary’s intention to marry Philip of Spain, had hoped to use Elizabeth to replace her Catholic sister. One day, Elizabeth reflected, such men might find a reason to overthrow her, either in favour of Mary, Queen of Scots, or of Katherine. A Prince could not trust even the children who were to succeed them, Elizabeth said – perhaps thinking of Katherine\s unborn child. Certainly her parting comment to Maitland concerned Katherine

‘She thought there was more matter hid in [the marriage with Hertford] than was yet uttered to the world’ Maitland recalled, ‘and that some of her nobility were partners in the making of that match.’

As Maitland returned to Scotland what Elizabeth had dreaded happened. On September 24th 1561, Katherine gave birth to a son: Edward Seymour, Viscount Beauchamp, heir to Elizabeth under the will of Henry VIII, following his mother in line of succession. Two days later he was baptised in the church at the Tower only feet from the decapitated remains of his aunt, Lady Jane Grey. A battle royal was now about to begin between Elizabeth and her own Secretary of State over the succession. Cecil’s first objective was to persuade the Queen to marry. Failing that she had to name her heir and have her choice ratified by parliament. Elizabeth however, had little inclination marry any of the foreign royals lined up for her: a foreign marriage had done her sister little good. She intended rather to destroy Katherine and her son, leaving the way open for Mary, Queen of Scots.

First Elizabeth ordered a Church commission find Katherine’s marriage invalid. This was not too difficult the only witness to it having died, and the priest vanished. But the only necessity for a valid marriage was a statement of intent followed by intercourse. The couple had done the former in their interrogations and now sympathetic warders in the Tower allowed Ned to corridor creep to Katherine’s rooms and lie with her on the striped satins of her bed. Elizabeth, meanwhile, unaware of this breach of security at the Tower, made plans to meet Mary, Queen of Scots in Nottingham and seal a dynastic alliance that would pave the way for a Stuart succession. Unfortunately, a massacre of Protestants in France by followers of Mary’s Guise uncles put paid to the meeting. And just as Elizabeth succeeded in having Katherine’s first son declared illegitimate, Katherine gave birth in February 1563 to a second boy.

Elizabeth had the Lieutenant of the Tower put in his own prison for his laxity, and the new parents were separated that summer in different country house prisons. Katherine was frank about how much she missed their love making. In a letter she told her ‘Ned’, ‘I long to be merry with you’, as they had been when their son was conceived: ‘I remember it more often that you know’. She looked forward desperately to seeing, ‘ my sweet bedfellow, that I once lay beside with joyful heart, and shall again’. And at court and in parliament, Cecil and her other supporters were doing their best to have the legitimacy her sons recognised, the couple freed, and Mary, Queen of Scots excluded from further discussions on the succession.

Efforts were made in the parliament of 1563 to limit the succession to four English families. When this failed a bill was proposed that would bring a Great Council into being on Elizabeth’s death, with the power to appoint her heir. This neo republican proposal has William Cecil’s fingerprints all over it – he would come up with a similar proposal in the 1580s. It got nowhere. But greater success was had with the writing of a book clarifying Katherine’s rights of succession. Composed by an MP and friend of Cecil’s called John Hales, the book attacked the claim of Mary, Queen of Scots, drawing attention to a law dating back to the reign of Edward III that excluded from the succession all those born outside the realm of England. It also discussed King Henry’s will in Katherine’s favour and quoted Protestant European clerics who ruled that Katherine was married according to church law.

When Elizabeth found out about Hales’s book he was sent to the Tower, with her complaining bitterly about his ‘writing so precisely against the Queen of Scotland’s title’. She warned Cecil she was aware that names associated the production of the book were clients of his. But as she also remarked to the Spanish ambassador, so many senior figures were involved she was forced to overlook their actions. Under such pressure Elizabeth wanted desperately to be able to trust Mary. She proposed the Queen of Scots marry the man she loved, Robert Dudley, and raised him to the title Earl of Leicester to make him a more attractive groom. But Mary married instead her English born cousin, Lord Darnley, another grandchild of Margaret Tudor. And when a son, James, was born Cecil and his allies redoubled efforts to have Mary excluded from the succession.

New tracts on the succession were published and in October 1566 MPs who supported Katherine threw punches on the floor of the Commons, as they fought for the right to debate the succession, against the Queen’s command. Despite the petitions that followed, Elizabeth declined to name any heir. But her long preferred choice Mary, Queen of Scots was now to self-destruct. Darnley was murdered and Mary married the man believed to be her husband’s murderer. She was promptly overthrown in a revolt led b her Protestant Lords, and her infant son crowned in her place. It seemed that Katherine and her supporters had won. But Katherine never would lie beside her Ned again, as she had dreamed she would. Separated from her husband and elder child for four years, Katherine had fallen into despair.

In January 1568 Katherine’s warder sent a letter asking for the royal doctor to help her. But she made it clear she had no wish to live. Katherine begged her warder instead to return to Hertford her wedding ring and take to him a parting gift: another ring engraved with the words, ‘While I lived, Yours’. She died, aged twenty-eight, four months before Mary Queen of Scots fled to England. Hertford was freed in 1571, still hoping his elder son, Lord Beauchamp, would one day be King. But at nineteen, Beauchamp fell in love with a gentlewoman not considered grand enough to be future royal consort. Elizabeth, delighted, gave the marriage her blessing. It was an unusual move in a Virgin Queen who had gained a reputation for sexual jealousy, and influenced by the fact it helped destroy Beauchamp’s chances for the crown.

Katherine’s younger son pre-deceased Elizabeth, dying in 1600, by which time William Cecil was also dead. His long pursuit of his bete noir, Mary, Queen of Scots, had ended with her trial and execution for treason in 1587. But the way was now clear for James VI, her son, who duly succeeded Elizabeth in 1603. The old Queen had been determined that divine right would succeed over parliamentary statue, and to King James it seemed this had been achieved. But the struggles over the succession had encouraged the development of a civic consciousness and desire to control the crown, that would make the exercise of autocratic rule increasingly problematic. Hertford lived long enough to see how unpopular King James became, and how Elizabeth’s memory was glorified as a means of criticizing her Stuart successor. He died aged 84, over fifty years after Katherine, having found in his last years, the priest who had married them.

The couple’s grandson, William Seymour, buried them together in a magnificent tomb in Salisbury cathedral. The engraved words celebrate the star-crossed lovers re-united at last; the Queen who never was lying above her husband to mark her royal status.

Katherine’s story was forgotten because it runs contrary to the mythology of the Virgin Queen that became an important party of English national identity Elizabeth refusal to tolerate an English, Protestant heir, does not fit with our image of the heroine of the Armada, or with the old tales of her rivalry with the Queen of Scots. It was also an inconvenient reminder of the argument that the Stuarts came to the throne illegally. Today Katherine’s heir remains, under the will of Henry VIII whose 500th anniversary falls this year, the rightful Queen of England.

THIS ARTICLE IS DRAWN FROM MORE EXTENSIVE MATERIAL IN LEANDA DE LISLE'S BEST SELLING TRIPLE BIOGRAPHY: THE SISTERS WHO WOULD BE QUEEN; THE TRAGEDY OF MARY, KATHERINE AND LADY JANE GREY

THE CATHOLIC HERALD: The romantic life and dramatic death of Owen Tudor, Welsh grandfather of Henry VII

The story of Owen Tudor, the humble Welsh progenitor of the dynasty is a largely forgotten tale in the Tudor canon. Yet it is a story with as much drama and romance as that of any of his royal descendants.

Owen was born to a landed family ruined after a great Welsh rebellion against Henry IV. He left for England to seek a better life, and in around 1427 found a position as a chamber servant to Henry V’s widow, Queen Catherine of Valois. Owen’s Welsh name meant, ‘Owen son of Meredith son of Tudor’, but in English he became simply, ‘Owen Tudor’. If the attempts to anglicise it had gone differently we might have had a dynasty of Merediths. Not that it had seemed likely Owen would spawn a dynasty at all.

The twenty-six year old Queen Catherine was lonely, however. The Council had forbidden her from re-marrying until her six-year old son, Henry VI, had grown up. An Act of Parliament had threatened to punish any great man who ignored this injunction. It seems never to have occurred to anyone that Catherine might marry instead a mere servant. But this was exactly what would happen.

The early Tudor historian, Polydore Vergil, explained that Owen was ‘adorned with wonderful gifts of body and mind’. Yet we hear little about his mind from anyone else. Other reports point exclusively to his good looks. It was said that he first came to the Queen’s attention during a party in her household. Catherine’s servants were dancing when Owen performed a wild leap and fell into her lap. She fell in love, they married and by 1437 they had four children.

The English elite complained bitterly that the Queen should have ‘proved unable to control her carnal passions’, and with ‘ no man of birth neither of livelihood’. There were also considered to be racial differences with the Welsh. Owen’s kin and countrymen were described ‘as most vile and barbarous’. The Council decided it was best therefore that the marriage remain secret until Henry VI had grown up and could decide what to do about it.

The king was sixteen and his mother was dying from a ‘grievous malady’, before he learned she had married, and that he had four half siblings, bearing the strange name, ‘Tudor’. Fearful of the king’s anger, Owen fled for Wales, but within months he was imprisoned at Newgate. Owen remained defiant, however, and the following year, 1438, he escaped, ‘hurting foul his keeper’. He was on the run for several weeks before being recaptured.

Henry VI had, meanwhile, taken charge of the upbringing of the Tudor children, and this may have helped soften his heart towards Owen. He pardoned him in 1439, and by 1444 was even referring to Owen as ‘our well beloved squire’. Still, the king was determined to keep a close grip of future marriages within his family. In 1453 it was Henry VI who arranged the betrothal between Owen’s eldest son, Edmund Tudor, and the nine-year old Margaret Beaufort, who, like the king, was descended from the royal House of Lancaster.

That year was, however, to be a disastrous one for Henry VI. He lost the English war in France and had a mental collapse. This weakness encouraged the ambitions of the rival House of York, and a spiral of violence began. Owen Tudor fought loyally for Henry VI in what later became known as the Wars of the Roses, and was one of the commanders of the royal forces confronting Yorkists at Mortimer Cross, Herefordshire in 1461.

The battle is remembered for the three suns that appeared in the sky, a phenomenon caused by light passing through ice crystals. Under those suns the Lancastrians fought and lost. Owen was captured and taken to Hereford. It was only when a Yorkist solider grabbed the collar of his red doublet to expose his neck, that Owen realised he was to be executed. Facing the block he managed a joke, recalling with dry wit how, ‘The head that shall lie on the stock was wont to lie on Queen Katherine’s lap’. At the fall of the axe the life that began with a trip at a party was ended.

Owen’s handsome head was placed on top step of the market cross where a woman, ‘combed his hair and washed away the blood off his face’. The watching crowd thought her mad. She was surely, however, the grief-stricken mother of Owen’s illegitimate infant son, David ‘Owen’. Even in his fifties Owen had the power to attract a woman’s love.

Owen Tudor’s royal grandson, Henry Tudor – the son of Margaret Beaufort and Edmund Tudor – was then four years old, and little David would grow up as loyal to the future Henry VII, as Owen Tudor had been to Henry VI. David was knighted in 1485, the year the first Tudor king was crowned. He lived well into the reign of Henry VIII, when he built a grand tomb for Owen at the Hereford Greyfriars. Sadly it was swept away at the Dissolution of the Monasteries. Henry VIII did not think the memory of a humble Welsh squire worth saving.

Today, Owen Tudor’s body lies under a 1970s housing estate. The forgotten ancestor of our best-known dynasty, his story is buried with the Catholic world of the Middle Ages.

THIS IS DRAWN FROM MORE EXTENSIVE MATERIAL IN LEANDA DE LISLE'S BEST SELLING Tudor: The Family Story (UK), published in the US under the title Tudor: Passion, Manipulation, Murder, the Story of Englandls Most Notorious Royal Family.

With today’s river flotilla set to be the high point of the Queen’s Jubilee celebrations, historian Leanda de Lisle looks at the tradition’s more controversial beginnings

A Canaletto depiction of a Thames pageant

Today’s Thames pageant will provide the glorious climax to Queen Elizabeth II’s Diamond Jubilee. Such pageants have a long royal history. Indeed, a river pageant marked the beginning of the reign of Queen Elizabeth I in 1559 – but it did not seem likely this daughter of scandal would survive long enough to enjoy any jubilees.

Back then, there was a fear in the chill January air as hundreds of barges were rowed down the Thames from Whitehall on the first of four days of coronation ceremonies. The courtiers were magnificently dressed in scarlet velvet. The young Elizabeth, meanwhile, sat among the tapestries of the royal barge, which was being towed by a galley of 40 men, pulling on their oars in shirtsleeves. The colour and sound of the spectacle was overwhelming. The brass blast of trumpets and the silvery notes of the flutes competed with the loud bang and effervescent sparkle of fireworks. It reminded an Italian onlooker of the Venetian celebrations in which a figure of the Blessed Virgin Mary was married to the sea.

An iconic portrait of Elizabeth I

But the 25-year-old Elizabeth had no right to the throne under the traditions of royal inheritance. The marriage between her ‘adulteress’ mother Anne Boleyn and Henry VIII had been declared void (and her mother beheaded). Elizabeth was therefore illegitimate. She was also a woman living in an era when men ruled, and in a country that was dangerously unstable. That much people knew – but Elizabeth also harboured a secret scandal.

In England, the tradition of a river pageant for a Queen’s coronation was already established. It dated back to the Tudor Queen’s grandmother, Elizabeth of York. In 1486, as the heir to the House of York – the white rose – she had married Elizabeth I’s grandfather Henry Tudor from the House of Lancaster – the red rose. In so doing, Elizabeth of York helped bring to an end the civil strife known as the Wars of the Roses.

People believed that only by marriage could Elizabeth I bring peace and security to a country divided by religion. But at the end of the month, when Parliament issued Elizabeth with a request that she marry, she defiantly announced that she would wait, and even that she would be content to live and die a virgin. Rumours began to swirl that Elizabeth could not enjoy sexual penetration or have children. That she was deformed internally.

But then another possible explanation emerged. That Elizabeth was secretly in love – with a married man. And the scandal soon broke. On the morning of 23 April 1559, the St George’s Day celebrations began with a chapter of the Garter at Whitehall. The Order of the Garter was the oldest in Europe and the most distinguished the Queen could bestow. She chose to grant it to her young Master of the Horse, Lord Robert Dudley – and her feelings for him started to become increasingly evident. At court the pair touched casually, as lovers do, and were seen to share private jokes.That night there was a grand supper, after which the court party took to the river. Thousands gathered on the banks of the Thames hoping to catch a glimpse of the Queen. A flotilla of boats and barges bobbed on the water about Elizabeth, while the night rang with guns firing in salute and the whiz and sparkle of ‘squibs hurled up into the air, as the Queen moved from place to place’. Needless to say, Lord Robert was close by.

The Spanish ambassador reported, ‘It is even said that her Majesty visits him in his chamber day and night. People talk of this so freely that they go so far [as] to say that his wife has a malady in one of her breasts, and that the Queen is only waiting for her to die to marry Lord Robert.’

Robert Dudley’s wife, a 27-year-old called Amy Robsart, was kept away from court and passed her time in country houses. It was at a house near Abingdon that she died the following year. She had not, though, died in her bed of breast cancer. Amy was found at the bottom of a flight of steps with a broken neck and head injuries. Did she fall or was she pushed?

Many were convinced that Robert Dudley had had his wife murdered so that he would be free to marry the Queen. However, to this day we don’t know what happened. It is possible that Amy was ill and fainted on the stairs, hitting her head on the stone floor. Whatever the truth, Elizabeth realised that if she married a suspected wife-killer she would be overthrown.

As time went by, it became clear to Elizabeth that no marriage would help secure her reign. Quite the opposite: whomever she chose as a husband would provoke anger in one group or another. If she picked an Englishman, there would be jealousy among the powerful men she did not choose; if she picked a foreigner, there would be the fear that England would be absorbed into a European empire. Elizabeth spoke often of how her sister Mary’s marriage to Philip of Spain had provoked a revolt. In the end, Elizabeth would never marry.

In 1578, when Elizabeth was 45, people began to call her the Virgin Queen. The so-called ‘river poets’ described the ‘fair silver Thames’ as now a place for ‘the Queen of Virgins only she’, and the nymphs who attended her were compared to swans. Yet people remained reluctant to believe that Elizabeth was really a virgin. Mary, Queen of Scots wrote to warn Elizabeth that the courtier Bess of Hardwick was spreading stories that she was a frustrated nymphomaniac who had sex with many men, but was unable to enjoy a normal sexual relationship.

In part, the rumours sprang from Elizabeth’s refusal to allow her younger royal cousins to wed. She imprisoned Lady Katherine and Lady Mary Grey for daring to marry in secret. Another cousin, Arbella Stuart, was never permitted to marry. Behind this apparent cruelty lay Elizabeth’s fear that they would produce the heir she never had.

When Elizabeth died on Thursday 24 March 1603, people still wondered about her sex life. She left instructions that her body was not to be disembowelled, a necessary treatment for it to be preserved until the funeral three weeks later. Ben Jonson, the playwright, teasingly suggested that she wished to hide that she ‘had a membrane on her which made her incapable of man, though for her delight she tried many’. Such stories have led to many exotic theories. In 1985 a medical historian claimed that Elizabeth had the condition testicular feminisation – that she was genetically male!

Despite Elizabeth’s orders, her body was treated for preservation. It was then placed in a simple oak coffin at Richmond and carried on to a black-draped barge for her final journey down the river. A small number of Privy Counsellors and Ladies of Honour accompanied the coffin. Torches lit the way, while behind followed other barges, filled with pensioners and officers of the household. They disembarked at the steps to Whitehall Palace. It was here that Elizabeth’s coronation pageant had begun 44 years earlier.

Elizabeth had survived and kept England free of civil war, perhaps because she did not marry. But the scandalous rumours of the life and loves of Queen Elizabeth were never stilled.

The Queen and Prince Philip aboard the new royal barge Gloriana, the focus of today’s pageant

At court, the twelve days of Christmas were a time for politics, intrigue and manoeuvre as well as for merry-making. Leanda de Lisle explores the mixed feelings induced in a courtier embroiled in the great affairs of the day, by two very different Christmases, just twelve months apart, in 1602 and 1603: the last Tudor and the first Stuart Christmas.

Queen Elizabeth’s godson, the writer and courtier Sir John Harington (1560-1612), arrived at Whitehall in time for the Christmas celebrations of 1602/3. The twelve-day celebrations were expected to be dull, but the new Comptroller, Sir Edward Wotton, who was responsible for the day-to-day running of the palace, had tried to inject fresh life into them. Dressed entirely in white, he had organized dances, bear-baiting and gambling. Courtiers were playing for the highest stakes. As Harington reflected, Elizabeth was sixty-nine: she could not live forever. The country was on the eve of change, and Harington found the prospect as exciting as it was terrifying. For all Sir Edward’s best efforts, this would not be a carefree season, but a time of jockeying for position in preparation for the regime to come, and overshadowed by the declining health of the Queen

Harington was called for an audience with the Queen soon after his arrival, and escorted along a dark passage to the Privy Chamber. Elizabeth sat on a raised platform with the Archbishop of Canterbury, John Whitgift, beside her. His plain clerical garb contrasted starkly with her bejewelled gowns and spangled wigs. People believed that Elizabeth used her glittering costumes to dazzle people so they, ‘ would not so easily discern the marks of age..’. But if so, she no longer considered them enough.

In February 1601 Elizabeth’s last great favourite, the Earl of Essex, had led a palace revolt. The childless Queen had always refused to name an heir, believing that to do so would maker her expendable. Essex hoped to force her to name James VI of Scots and to overthrow her corrupt Secretary of State, Sir Robert Cecil. The revolt had failed, Essex had been executed and his noble followers, the young Earls of Southampton and Rutland, remained in the Tower. But the episode had left Elizabeth depressed and fearful. Anxious that any intimation of mortality would attract speculation on her successor she filled out her cheeks with fine cloths and wore make up down to her breast, ‘in some places near half an inch thick.’ There were some things, however, that she could not hide.

Elizabeth’s throat was so sore, and her state of mind so troubled, that she could barely speak during Harington’s audience. When she did, it was of Essex, at which she wept and struck her breast. ‘She held in her hand a golden cup, which she often put to her lips; but in soothe’ Harington told his wife, ‘ her heart seemed too full to lack [need] more filling.’ He saw the Queen again later that night and the following day, only to discover she was not eating and had grown forgetful: he believed she had months to live. No one dared to openly voice the seriousness of her condition, but he did find, ‘some less mindful of what they are soon to lose, than of what they may perchance hereafter get’.

A new monarch would need to acquire widespread support to secure their position against rivals. That meant an opening up of the royal purse: there would be gifts of land and office and title. Harington was too discreet to name names but he told his wife he had attended a dinner with the Archbishop and that many of Elizabeth own clerics appeared to be, ‘well anointed with the oil of gladness’. The spectacle of Elizabeth misery amidst this feasting saddened Harington, but he too was full of hopes for the future - not all of them selfish.

Harington was a Protestant, but like many at court he had Catholic friends and relations. He hated their persecution by Elizabeth’s government and was aware that although King James – the great-grandson of Henry VIII’s sister, Margaret - was a Protestant his mother, Mary Queen of Scots, was regarded as akin a Catholic martyr. Harington believed James could heal the bitter divisions in England and suggested that he introduce toleration of religion in a Tract arguing James’s right of succession.

As Harington predicted Elizabeth’s health deteriorated that winter and she died in March, the last of the Tudors. Cecil immediately proclaimed James King in London. The nation held its breath for several days. But there were no uprisings in favour of other candidates for the crown, only celebrations. James promised to be all things to all men: courtiers hoped for wealth denied them by the parsimonious Elizabeth, Puritans for reform of the English Church and many Catholics, thinking their sufferings were now over, showed themselves anxious to prove their loyalty.

On April 5th James began his journey from Edinburgh to London. He was to crowned at Westminster Abbey in July, along with his wife Anna. But the celebrations at the time of his accession were now well and truly over. London’s bells tolled for thousands dying from plague, and there were courtiers and priests in the Tower on charges of treason. The optimism of the early days had dissipated and Harington was amongst the disappointed – but he was back at court for the first Christmas celebrations of James’s reign. This time they were at Hampton Court, with its forest of turrets and gilded weathervanes.

The Earl of Essex, who had rebelled against Elizabeth, was now referred to as James’s ‘martyr’, and the Earls of Southampton and Rutland were free men. But their old enemy, Cecil, remained Secretary of State. He was busy promoting the King’s unpopular plan for union between his kingdoms. And everywhere, it seemed, there were Scots, enriched by English wealth and, rumour had it, seeking the confiscated lands of the courtiers found guilty of treason against the new King.

Amongst the condemned was Elizabeth’s Captain of the Guard, Sir Walter Ralegh. He had lost his post to a Scot, Sir Thomas Erskine, in May and was convicted of subsequently trying to overthrow James in favour of his English born cousin, Arbella Stuart. Harington’s Catholic cousin, Sir Griffin Markham, was another convicted traitor, condemned for a separate plot to force James to introduce toleration of religion.

Catholic hopes had shattered as James had journeyed south, ordering general pardons for prisoners, from which Papists were excluded, along with murderers. Markham’s co-conspirators had included two priests who had been amongst James’s most vociferous supporters before his accession. The priests were hung, drawn and quartered in early December. Markham life was spared, at the cost of exile and the promise to act as a spy on his co-religionists. Harington’s hopes of royalfavour had come to centre on being granted his cousin’s attainted property. But although he now mourned the Queen he had lost, all around him her memory was treated with contempt.

Harington learnt, to his disgust, that Anna had ordered Elizabeth’s best costumes be taken from the Tower to be cut up and re-arranged as costumes for her forthcoming masque, The Vision of the Twelve Goddesses. Anna herself was to perform as Pallas Athene, in a dress cut to the knee. Some thirty plays were also planned. William’s Shakespeare’s company performed several, including A Midsummer’s Night Dream and Ben Jonson’ s Sejenus, His Fall. There was a new hedonism abroad. Even the court Ladies now played drunken games, and the young heir, Prince Henry found himself being thrown around like a tennis ball by dancing courtiers after his mother’s masque.

James was chiefly occupied with entertaining visiting ambassadors, but he found time to see Harington, who had had the sense to befriend his Scots favourites. After a formal audience in the Presence Chamber, Harington was escorted to a small room furnished with a table covered in James’s paper, ink and pens. James came in shortly afterwards.

At thirty-even, James was a man of restless energy, of good height and build, but with weak legs. He usually leaned on a courtier as he walked. James was in a jovial mood, and said that he had heard a great deal about Harington’s learning. He showed off his own, quoting, ‘Aristotle, and such like writers’ and asked Harington, ‘Whether a King should not be the best clerk in his own country; and if this land did not entertain good opinion of his learning and wisdom?’ Harington reassured James everyone in England admired him. But James had other concerns. Smoking was very fashionableandJames told Harington that he believed tobacco, ‘ would, by its use, infuse ill qualities on the brain.. and (he) wished it forbidden’. He was already planning a treatise, ‘A Counter-Blast to Tobacco’ and may have been writing it at the table in the room in which they stood.

A further cause for alarm, in James’s eyes, was the slack attitude to witchcraft. James asked Harington, gravely, if he knew why it was that the devil so often worked in old women? Harington couldn’t resist ‘a scurvy jest’ and replied that ‘we were taught hereof in scripture where it is told, that the devil walketh in dry places’. James enjoyed the joke, but he was in deadly earnest about the danger from witches and saw to it that witchcraft was made a capital offence in England that spring.

The conversation now led to James’s favourite subject: religion. Toleration for Catholics was a dead letter and the topic of the moment was the Conference on the English Church, shortly to be held at Hampton Court palace. James intended to thrash out a middle ground between those wished to keep the Church as it was and the more radical reforms of Puritans, who had believed James sympathised with their cause. Harington intended to witness the Conference and James closed the audience praying that Harington do him justice in his reports.

Elizabeth’s godson, ‘..made courtesy here at, and withdrew down the passage, and out at the gate, amidst the many varlets and lordly servants who stood around’. Christmas was over and the new age had dawned, but there would be no more seasons at court in which James’s popularity would outshine that of the dead Queen.

THE GUARDIAN: The King & I

Would the Queen be more popular with Australians if she chowed down with them at barbecues? Matthew Engel in this newspaper certainly suggested recently that "ordinary guy", King Harald of Norway, could teach her a "thing or two".

However, in my experience an ordinary royal is an oxymoron. They may ride bicycles, but they are always on pedestals - and they look to each other, not for lessons, but for a safety net when they fall off them. I studied with interest the Guardian's photograph of the previous King of Norway - Olav V - travelling on a tram. It was taken about a year before he came to lunch at my parent's terraced house in London.

It was an event that proved about as "ordinary" as a Martian landing. I was 14, an age when you are desperate to blend in with your peers. This proved difficult when, in the middle of a class, my teacher announced, "Leanda is now going off for lunch with a king." I concentrated very hard on piling up my exercise books as one of those peers goaded, "I didn't know you knew any kings, Leanda."

Indeed I hadn't made friends with any kings down at the local Wimpy Bar. However, from what I'd heard, my father had almost grown up with the Norwegian royal family. They had lived in his parents' house in Berkshire for much of the second world war. I didn't wonder at the time why this should be, since there is no accounting for the behaviour of one's parents or grandparents. Nevertheless, I did worry what our neighbours and the regulars in our street's five pubs, would make of the Rolls-Royce that drew up outside our front door.

The area we lived in - Brook Green in west London - is now so chic that it is difficult to believe that it was working class until less than 20 years ago. But it was so, and there were few cars there besides my parents' old Ford Cortina.

The image of the king's impossibly big, curvaceous and shiny Rolls-Royce still stays with me. When it arrived, it looked like a patent leather clad duchess parked on the dusty curb. On its bonnet a flag fluttered in the breeze. Clearly King Olav V had decided against visiting us incognito.

Why was he coming to visit? My great-uncle, Sir Cecil Dormer had been the British minister in Norway when the Nazis invaded in 1940. He persuaded King Haakon VII, together with the then Crown Prince Olav and the entire Norwegian cabinet to flee on the HMS Devonshire.

While at sea, the Devonshire received a message. The aircraft carrier Glorious and two escort destroyers, had come under German attack. The signal was ignored. The official story is that it had been too garbled for the captain, Admiral Cunningham, to make sense of. However witnesses have since said that it was perfectly clear. Not long after, Glorious and her escorts sank. There were 900 men who went into the water, but the Devonshire kept to her course and maintained radio silence. Three days later a passing Norwegian trawler rescued a mere 41 survivors.

I expect the lunches Admiral Cunningham attended at my grandparents' house were rather different from the one I served for the Norwegian king, squeezing my way around the chairs in our tiny London dining room.

However my father remembered the etiquette: he told me that I must not eat after the king had finished his food. Unfortunately by the time I'd sat down after serving each course, the king had had his fill and I was left staring forlornly at my plate.

The meal then concluded with him falling asleep. He appeared to be very old. It seems strange to me that his life might once have meant as much as that of 900 young men.

However, the lives of the Norwegian royal family were important not only to the British government, for whom they had propaganda value, but to George VI. Saving his uncle-in-law and first cousin might have helped expunge the memory of other royal cousins who had needed his family's help, but were left to die.

For both the British and Norwegian royal families, the other battleship that never came was the one that failed to rescue the Tsar and his family after 1917. King Haakon said to my grandparents that he offered to send a battleship for the Tsar, but George V, his brother-in-law, had told him not to bother: he would do so himself.

Documents about the 1917-18 imprisonment of the imperial family have been removed from the British royal archives. However, George V's campaign to refuse the Tsar asylum is well recorded. My grandparents always said King Haakon never forgave him for the Tsar's subsequent death. In 1940, King Haakon and Crown Prince Olav were not to be allowed to suffer the same fate.

THE GUARDIAN: When an inn was fit for a king

Today's monarch may not stay at the Nag's Head, but the first Elizabethans had no such airs and graces

The Guardian, Wednesday 8 June 2005 00.38 BST

Where will the Queen stay for the York races this week? Not at the Nag's Head, where she won a free night, we are assured. It is considered beyond possibility that our crowned head would stay at a Yorkshire inn. But more than 400 years ago King James I of England and VI of Scotland was happy to be placed in one and he was an absolute monarch.

James arrived at the Sun and Bear inn near Doncaster in April 1603, three weeks after the first Queen Elizabeth had died. He was travelling south from Scotland, where he had been king since infanthood, to London to claim the English throne. The chief governor of the north, Lord Burghley, had intended to put him up at Pontefract Castle, but it was in a poor state of repair and the Sun and Bear was deemed more comfortable. English inns were then renowned for well-furnished rooms, helpful staff and good food. A wide variety of fresh meat and fish was usually offered. But the Nag's Head, with its cheerful chintz and home-cooked grub, is not so very different - so why is it considered beyond possibility that the Queen might stay there?

For all the talk of people wanting a monarch who bicycles the streets rather than being carried by coach, the truth is that the English expect their crowned heads to appear superior to ord-inary mortals. The first Elizabeth dressed the part of a monarch in fabulous costumes. The second wears the world's largest diamonds - and shares her predecessor's ability to carry off such extreme style with a natural presence and good instincts about what plays well with a crowd. It was, however, quickly apparent to the English that James had none of these things.

Before James left Edinburgh he bought a purple velvet suit in an effort to upgrade his modest wardrobe, but his appearance never impressed. The Venetian ambassador thought he could be taken for the lowliest of the English court and Francis Bacon complained that he was like a king from ancient times.

James swore and drank, he made vulgar jokes and he fawned over handsome young men even in the middle of his coronation. Furthermore he didn't play to the crowds, but rather appeared to hate them. The Elizabethans were used to what has been called "a theatre of reciprocity" - something Princess Diana would have understood. They threw themselves on their knees when the queen passed and she would assure the people that she loved them, as they loved her. Diana's "Queen of Hearts" speech was the nearest we have come to it in modern times.

But James, who was raised in a violent country, was afraid of crowds. He ignored the kneeling people who greeted him in Berwick with cries of "Welcome!" and when he reached York he ordered the city to have the areas around his lodging cleared. Further orders instructed house-to-house searches for weapons and demanded that trusted men be employed to hold back the people who came out to see him. It was suggested that Lord Burghley "tell the mayor it is for the avoiding of heat, evil air ... and what[ever] other colours it shall please your Lordship [to] allege". But it was impossible to keep James's attitude secret for long.

While today's Queen enjoys watching horseracing, from a royal enclosure but alongside ordinary people, James attempted to ban the peasants from taking part in his favourite sport, hunting, by making it illegal for them to keep hounds. He spent the summer galloping over the farmers' crops, careless of the famine that heralded the new reign. On one infamous occasion he responded to a request to acknowledge the knots of people gathered at the roadside by crying out in Scots: "By God's wounds! I will pull down my breeches and they shall also see my arse." By September the English court had begun to imitate James's disdain for ordinary people - but his lack of dignity was to be the undoing of his reputation.

You have only to recall the national shudder when the Duchess of York first strode across our TV screens, and the virtual airbrushing of Prince Edward from the royal family after the Royal Knockabout fiasco, to appreciate that the English are intolerant of vulgarity in royalty. King James was one of the greatest kings of Scotland; he brought peace to England and had perhaps the finest intellect of any monarch of his generation. But he has never been forgiven for dribbling his wine, scratching his codpiece and slobbering over his boyfriends. Even his son, Charles I, who brought England to civil war, is not remembered with such disgust.

Elizabeth II does not have the first Elizabeth's talent for the gushing speech, as her very English former daughter-in-law did, but she makes up in style what she lacks in mush. And instinctively our hardened hacks like that, so our Queen may not stay in a Yorkshire inn - even if the first Elizabethans thought them good enough for a Scots king.

· Leanda de Lisle is the author of After Elizabeth: How James, King of Scots, Won the Crown of England in 1603